Thanks for the help with the mids and gthe instr functions they worked a treat but now I have another problem. 

 

The textcol field in the table has plenty of text within it, the text go on to different lines and so on.  The problem I am having is that I am finding my start up points ok, then using mid to extract, the issue is that I need to know where the ending points are as in certain senerio's the formula reads past the text that i want and on to the next line.

 

I hope I have made myself clear on what I mean.

 

any help on the above would be much appreciated.

 

shiv