jonathan said:

>   lochness!

i knew that...        :+)


>   there can be perfectly valid reasons [imagine a spreadsheet] 
>   for having xx thousand handles each capable of containing text 
>   and needing to be searched.  even a simple database...

but it is possible to concatenate all those handles, right?

or even to treat them generally as one handle, 
but split them out to put 'em in edit fields, right?

-bowerbird