wow! it worked! thank you.

1. why didn't Rick's code alone work on these particular contacts? Rick's code has worked time and time again for me. Even when I pasted the text into a textpad then back into a brand new excel file they still wouldn't work, even alongside other similar data that Rick's code was handling just fine. It confounds me.

2. Will this combination of Rick's code and the new code work across the board for all such data? Or just in this instance where Rick's code isn't doing the trick for whatever weird reason?

Thanks guys.