Mr Geren, I should have thought of suggesting color coding; I use it often enough. But what I never thought of is including the space-asterisk combination in the formatting! That's ingenious, and solves his problem at least to some extent. It may still be a pain maintaining the various markers, but at least it doesn't spoil calculations.

Mark, if you didn't understand that part of David's suggestions, you should ask; it may well be worth your while, if you feel that the extra column is a second-best solution.