Thanks for all your help... Put up a post go to bed then there is all these lovely answers... Lots of leads to follow thanks. I am afraid I am stuck using VB. We are developing in-house tools in Excel for Scientist to use the hydrological data from our database. They are familiar with Excel. Also VB is the language that ArcGIS uses (esri's GIS).. As I have gotten older I have found that it is much easier to go with the flow and there are many other pieces of VB code that do similar stuff.. That said I would really like to be able to call Perl scripts I have written from VB occasionally... But I have been completely stumped how I could do this.. But know I have some places to look thanks..