I can't give you a complete answer on this, bremen22; I have yet to work out a complete theory of the contents of a cell. But I can agree with your observation; cells that I change from something to "" are not quite the same as cells that never had anything in them in the first place. I'm pretty sure I have sometimes done an <End>,<Down> in a column and have it stop at a cell that used to have something in it and now doesn't.

I'm not sure, but I've a notion that hitting <Del> clears that status. If I'm right, that implies that an empty string is still data ... which from a programmer's point of view makes sense, actually. So my guess is that a cell with "" in it is not yet Empty, but after I hit <Del>, or in your case after you ClearContents, then it's Empty.

All this makes sounds so obvious now that I'm writing it down, but I've never sat down to think about it carefully before. I guess I'll have to experiment a bit.