Thanks for the nod fools. That said, I wouldn't necessarily consider my normalize function as recommended. It was more of an acedemic response to a contrived challenge that doesn't tend to exist much in real life. That is, data is normally consistant (tho it may be ugly). Be it spawned from a spreadsheet, a database, a data collector ... whatever. As such -- and especially if you're concerned with performance -- tailored code will perform far better than my "try to do it all" function. Cheers.