Ah, it's fun being appreciated . Remember what I said: In my experience, I've found that many VLOOKUP-or-whatevers to an external closed workbook is significantly slower than if it's open. I have one application where I write the VBA code to actually copy the table into a worksheet in the current workbook, every time it runs, to be sure of getting the latest info but without the drag on the lookups itself. Mind you, that one has a short lookup table but tens of thousands of rows doing lookups on it. If it were only a few hundred lookups it might not matter.