Thanks for the help it worked nicely and gave good grounds to carry on
with.

im now putting line contents into its cells no problem, its just
the .GFF file seems to always be on top of the excel sheet, is there
any way of putting this in the background and still reading from it?
i have a date checker in place which checks the date on a spacific
line, if the date in the file is less than the current date a yes/no
box appears, the user cannot see this box as the .GFF file is still as
the front of the screen.

Application.ScreenUpdating = False doesnt seem to do the trick

Thanks again!