Hi Jo be a bit careful with that ACT deaths file. The dates are a bit suspect in places. If you go down to Ongley, Arthur Bowden you'll find he died in the 13th month. They've used Excel and a custom format for the dates column d/m/yyyy and it's scrambled all the dates. Anybody out there using Excel as a database are advised to format any columns in which you are going to put dates as TEXT. Excel has big trouble with dates. Excel can't sort dates before 1900 so you may as well format the column as TEXT. Select the column(s) where you want to enter dates. Click on "Format" on the menu bar across the screen, drop down and click on "Cells", in the dialog box that opens up click on "TEXT" and click on OK. Yours, Garry.