Hi all, apologies for the tardiness in replying.... Firstly thank you everyone who offered a solution. As always, more than one way to skin a cat.... There were a number of solutions offered to improve the macro itself. A bit above my level at the moment but something to work on for future projects. Going to look at upgrading my excel on the win 7 too. I played around with some settings also suggested and I did see some slight improvements but others were already setup What I have ended up doing though is getting a couple of other XP machines up and running, which has greatly sped up the process. Maybe not the prettiest, but seemed to me that this was the easiest and quickest solution to my problem. Once again though, Thanks to everyone who has offered advice on the topic. Definitely know a lot more now than I did before