Thanks Paul. Unfortunately your suggested solution does not achieve the desired goal. The problem is that the text contained in the EXCEL cell (I have tried with both General and with text format) can contain up to 1500 - 2000 characters distributed into several hundred words. The overall EXCEL .xls file is about 10 MB size, and contains about 3000 rows with up to 17 coloumns. Trying your replace <*> trick just on the column that I am trying to strip the html markupo from in EXCEL gives me an error meaasage saying 'Formula is too long'. Importing the whole .xls file into ACCESS, and trying the same replace operation on the column in question also gives an ACCESS error: 'There isn't enough free memory to continue the search'
So, the resolution to this problem is a little appears to be a little more subtle than a simple replace <*>, and is presumably related to the size of the information in the cell. I am running on XP with a pentium laptop with 1 GB of physical RAM, with about 600 MBytes which is free of other processes (and hence available to EXCEL in principal), and 2.2 GBytes of free page file space.
Many thanks for any futher suggestions to help solve this problem
Glenn White
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