"Smallweed" wrote in message
...
Thanks for all the replies; I especially like the double unary as a neat
method of, in effect, multiplying by 1. (Incidentally I did a search on
that
and was interested to see that you can also use this -- prefix for the
lookup
value in a VLOOKUP in case your lookup value is text and the first column
of
the lookup table is numbers - useful if unrelated!).


Yes, because -- is coercing to number, so anything that is numeric,
including say "1234", can be coerced.