Thanks a lot for that,
one last tquestion - I dont know If I should start a new thread or not?
the Data Grabs and pastes perfectly now but the Macro copies the data from the open file - the problem is that every day the filename (eg stats_01_02) changes according to the date so what I want to know is how to have the macro copy the data from an open file using just the first part of the filename.
Thanks a lot - really appreciate your help