Hi -

I'm setting up a budgeting application for work.
I have the results of all of our current year budgeted and actual
entries from our ERP system.
I need to read these in and sort them.

I'm not too worried about the sort - there is a great routine in John
Walkenbach's books (Chpt 11?)
The problem I'm having is in finding a good way to read the data in.

The data is in multiple workbooks because its too big to fit into a
single worksheet.
The ranges - when put together are something like 250,000 rows long by
11 rows wide.
I need to read this into an array. I was doing it cell by cell into an
array something like the following:

Range("A1").Offset(row,column).Select

MyArray(row,column) = ActiveCell.Value

But this is taking an enourmous amount of time.

To complicate things futher, our ERP system turns some numbers into
text when it dumps them
into Excel. Within a column, values are either numbers or text that
looks like numbers.

I'd like to convert them all to numbers as I read them in.

I set up routine that estimates how long it is going to take to
complete this task - and its something like over 5 hours....

Any suggestions?

Should I right a pre-processing routine that pastes the =value(cell)
formula on the actual worksheet, converting everything to numbers
first then run the routine to read numbers in?

Thanks for suggestions...