Hi Dave

Thanks for your response.

Should have said 20 workbooks, each workbook having 23 worksheets (1 per
employee plus summaries).

Not all employees work every week/

The employee sheet is in effect a database containing all of his personal
details. Each employee is a shareholder of his company and his pay consists
of a combination of wages and dividends worked out weekly and stored in his
worksheet.

The weekly input data comes from another department that uses a different
system but can give me excel output. Initially it is not in a format that
suits me but i runa macro that tidies it up nicely. As not every employee
works every week the out put from the other department is in variable
sequence, i.e: I may have 80 completely different employees to pay this week
as opposed to last. They cannot produce outputs containing zero values
otherwise I could simply map the relevent parts of their database to mine.

I get round this by filtering the outputs so that I can identify each
employee by workbook and worksheet. A series of nested "if statements" then
realign the data so that it can be mapped into the appropriate worksheets.
The nested if statements work, they are in the form:

if(a1="Joe Bloggs", b1,0)+if (a2="Joe Bloggs",b2,0)......b1 and b2 being
values filtered from the other departments outputs.

The text "Joe Bloggs" also comes from the other depatrments outputs and are
filtered into the sheet before the nested ifs take over. HOWEVER the if
statement won't recognise "Joe Bloggs" in its original form. It will only
read it if I overtype it and or add "quotes".

As the purpose of this exercise is, amongst other things, to avoid
repreating data entry I am faced with an equal amount of work and error
potential if I have to overtype any one of 400 possible names.

Thanks again

Kind Regards

Dave.