Tushar,

Thanks for the suggestion. Thanks also to Tom, whose suggestion I
didn't mean to disregard.

If I understand you correctly, you are saying I need to do some
preprocessing of the source filenames before executing the consolidate
method.

So I would find all a*.xls files, use the IsNumeric test to eliminate
the irrelavent ones, and then build a string array of the remaining
file names to pass to the Source parameter of the Consolidate method.
Am I on the right track?

Maybe I was just being lazy by trying to make this work all within the
Consolidate statement.

Best regards,
Jeff