The point is, as I said, initializing it to something that cannot be in the table. That way, the compare in the first pass through the loop will always fail, which is what I need.

But even if you cannot see a point, do you know if there is a Variant value that will fail a compare with any possible text value?

That fails if the data in the first row of the table is "". I admit that that is highly unlikely, but as Murphy (or someone) said, anything that can go wrong will go wrong.