Thanks for the quick answers and the Excel statement-help.  I know nothing
about Visual Basic or macro languages so those ideas went right over my head.

The IF statements worked great but I left out one requirement (constraint?)
in my earlier description of the data an my requirements.

The format of some numbers includes leading zeros that I need to preserve.

Example:  0023B  needs to wind up as 0023.  Presently its ending up as 23.  

For what it's worth the data in the row, even though they appear to be
alpha, will still be considered in a numeric argument.  I wrote "IF(D4>D5,
'HI", "LO")  and stretched that formula down about ten cells and it was
treating the field as numeric in terms of validating the argument.  Odd in my
little IF statement above, it ignored the traling alpha.  Example 1500B was
greater than 1412 when the IF statement was run.  I hope these comments about
the nature of the data will be helpful.

Thanks for your earlier help.  I hope I can find a way to keep my zeros.