The original request was my own doing. I had code that extracted text I searched regardless of case and matching whole words (I adapted it from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2...n-one-workbook). I usually got rows that I didn't want just because the code wasn't matching, so I wondered about changing it to match the whole word. Not being a VBA guru, I had to look for examples that I could maybe adapt for my purpose.

I did just comment out two lines of code: the 'If b < 48 Or a > 57 Then' and the 'If a < 48 Or b > 57 Then' which I had added so the code would include numbers adjacent to the search text when it was looking to determine if the whole word was a match. When I ran that code, it found the same number of hits as the original code above searching for a word that I knew was a whole word in all 260 occurrences. With that b < 48 Or a > 57 code uncommented, I got 89 hits on the same search term. That is great - but if I added a number to the search term in one of the rows, the code doesn't recognize it, whether or not the b < 48 Or a > 57 lines are there. So the way it is now, I think the only reason lines will be skipped is if the search term is either preceded or followed by a number (without a space). I guess I can live with that. In the example you mention (seq 23: Antikythera, seq29: no space between writes and the seq 108 and 109: Southern Ohio), 'the' is not a whole word, so on a whole word match run, I don't want those rows. Only if I choose "all occurrences" would I want to see 'the'.

If you can suggest a way to have the code see numbers without compromising the other (whole word match) searching, I''d be happy to hear it!