Thanks,
That would certainly work. What I actually did was to write my own program to deal with situation. The thing I really take issue with is not that Excel gave me incorrect results in a way that was not at all obvious. At first I came to incorrect conclusions about my data and then it took me several hours to figure out what was going on.
It would be good if Microsoft put in a warning if any of the relevant functions are applied to strings longer than 255.
Ethan