Scrolling through a sorted list would hardly take much longer than typing. That said, what you require if you're going to allow free input is some form of error-trapping. For that, you could use the keypress event to test each character as it's input to prevent invalid strings being input, or you wait till the string has been then test for its presence amongst the other entries and, if not found, delete the entry and return the user to the combobox instead of continuing with the processing.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]