Hi Rick,

I thought about the findformat method. But I think findformat was introduced in XL 2002/2003 (not sure which one).

So I thought it would be better a function whch works on all versions(not sure about XL 97 though)

Another point, if you pass a string it must be a range address, otherwise it would throw error.

I did a small test on A1:K10000 with 1169 merged areas, and the average time taken is as follows:

Ricks - 5 secs
Mine - 7 secs

Anyway thanks for posting an alternative (I would say native) method.