But you still need to initialise it somehow. And, of course, the whole point of the comparison is to change the highlight when they cease to be identical. Rather more complicated code could be used to do that within the loop, but the code would then run more slowly overall, which brings us to:
Nor do I.
I can't see the point of that - one could just as easily initialise it as:


StrTitle = ""
(or not even bother initialising it), but then the shading would necessarily start at the second data row (undesirable), though the code could be modified to make it start at the first data row.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

The point is, as I said, initializing it to something that cannot be in the table. That way, the compare in the first pass through the loop will always fail, which is what I need.

But even if you cannot see a point, do you know if there is a Variant value that will fail a compare with any possible text value?

That fails if the data in the first row of the table is "". I admit that that is highly unlikely, but as Murphy (or someone) said, anything that can go wrong will go wrong.