Thanks, I really appreciate your input. I already came up with the solution of having another cell change color and come up with a warning message indicating that the field length had been exceeded. But I would be interested if you know macro code that would convert all "pastes" to "paste special" and/or reactivates the data validation. I suppose that would involve some sort of "click event" or "change event". I found syntax in excel help for such things, but could not make enough sense of their general formulas to convert it into actual code that works. Thanks again for taking time to reply.