If you have the comments, plus the inputters' details and the file names & paths in the Excel workbook and you want to find a given set of comments by a given inputter, surely you'd only need to go through the workbook looking for matches between the comments you're looking for and the inputter's details? Only then, if you need to see the context, would you need to open any files and then only for those for the matching comments and inputter. I can't see any reason to re-process all 40k files just to do that.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]