Search string for defined set of characters

**taylormade58** · 11-21-2009, 04:23 AM

Here’s my problem:

I have about 700 cells I want to interrogate.

Within each cell the following text appears “Estimate – BOLB/02/1234 – Some more text here”

I want to search all the cells and delete the cell contents but leave the “BOLB/02/1234”.

The problem I have is that the string is different in each cell but the format is the same. It always starts with BOLB followed by /, followed by 2 numbers, followed by / followed by 4 numbers i.e. BOLB/**/****.

I am struggling to find a solution to this

Thanks for any help in advance!

**JeanRage** · 11-21-2009, 04:25 AM

Hi,

I hope I am wrong ... but a copy paste would do the job ...???
Oops ... numbers are different ...

=MID(A1,SEARCH("BOLB",A1),11)

HTH

**DonkeyOte** · 11-21-2009, 04:31 AM

EDIT: below was in response to above pre-edit, now post-edit it is now in essence a repetition of the above.

taylormade58, are the 700 cells in a contiguous range and does the string of interest appear in each ?

If for ex. the values were in A1:A700 you could use temp formulae to do the extraction in B1:B700

B1: =MID(A1,SEARCH("BOLB/??/????",A1),12)
copied down

Then copy B1:B700 results and paste over A1:A700 as values.