Thank you. It worked beautifully.
Although I've run into another (I think much harder) problem. I arranged shifts into three categories: day, afternoon and night. There are three required people on each shift per day. BUT we have in place a shift rota that requires that an entry into one cell (at random) be copied to specific cells to fill the rota correctly.
I've looked a simple solution such as A1=C3,C4,C5 but that means for each cell I have to enter a different formula. I was thinking of something along the lines of: IF(A1=text,"1","0") Then using the 1 to fill the cells assigned - then i lose the specific text. (In this case initials in a list defined by data validation.) In this way the wrong text cannot be entered so I think it would be easy to copy to the other cells in the list. But the solution eludes me still. I hope I'm not asking too simple of questions. Thanks again