Pulling Multiple Dates from a Cell

[clawinger]

I have a rather tricky Scenario, in one cell i have the start date and time of an event, and in another cell i have multiple times and dates and only some are relevant to me.

in this Cell i need to know the time between when John (ID: a1xjszz) and Ben(ID:a22kdzz) had touched the project. the trick here is that, although there are a limited number of "john's" the is an infinite number of "ben's" and there is never a set number of Characters between the two times.

10/1/2012 3:48:53 AM a22kdzz Ben 10/1/2012 3:52:16 AM a1xjszz John


In the Attachment i have given 2 examples. some information had to be removed to keep data private and others had to be modified, but the theories are that same.

my goal is in column N to have the time it took from one of my employees to touch the project after tBook1 (excel Forum).xlsxhe person before them. i have all of the ID's of all my employees in A1:L1. however the name and ID before them could be in the millions of variables. and the number of characters between the 2 dates could vary from 20 to 500.

you can see in A2:L3 i pulled the time from before an employee and subtracted the "arrival time". this however is not what i am looking for. i left it in there as a reference for what i have already tried to do. it is sometimes not accurate, so i would rather find a way to do what i listed above.

all columns from A-O can be modified and changed in any way. please let me know if this is even possible, i am trying to find a way to prevent me from doing this manually every week. i am VERY aware that the formulas in A2:L3 are VERY messy and not every part of them works, but it gets the job done, although i do need to apologize.

[clawinger]

Book1 (excel Forum).xlsx

Sorry I didn't see where the attachment landed until after I posted, here it is again.