Thanks for the response. I haven't been given all the tests so far so it was
more a matter of exploring the possibilities. I think the helper scells
could assist but if I run into any further difficulties when developing the
final version I'll post then.

G

"Bob Phillips" wrote:

How about using helper cells, evaluate part in another cell and use that to
reduce the number of characters. OR maybe a different approach, what are the
tests?

--
HTH

Bob

(there's no email, no snail mail, but somewhere should be gmail in my addy)

"Constantly Amazed" wrote in
message ...
Hi

I'm using Excel 2002 and wanted to create a conditional form to check that
certain control characters were not present in data to be uploaded to a
database. I was using the OR function, so that I was not restricted by
the
normal nested IF issue, in conjunction with
LEN(A1)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"*","")) as the test.

OR should take up to 30 tests (according to Help) but I have found that in
entering this in the Conditional Formatting there appears to a limit of
254
characters (so I can only get 7. Can anyone confirm that this is the case
and if it has changed in later versions of Excel?

Is there an alternative test which does not use so many characters?

Thanks

G