extracting a substring of mixed numbers and capital letters from text field to a column

[steik]

Hello everyone - I am very green at this, there's a learning curve so please bear with me

I have a worksheet with column E in which each cell is a field of text/comments that contain a list of equipment numbers. The equipment numbers are what I'm trying to extract into column A. I am having a difficult time with the MID function - having used FIND to locate what I think is one of the distiguishable constants which is a lowercase "f" just a few spaces before the equipment is listed out. However, these fields were manually enetered and have inconsistencies - which has me wondering if I might be able to do some sort of camparison in which the first instance of an equipment number can be found and used as a start point? The list almost always ends with a period so I think think thats a good end point..but I can't seem to get it to extraxt at the right point..I end up with the lowercase "f" and about 20-something characters trailing..

There are many of these cells I'll be working with - my objective ultimately is to:

1. extract the equipment numbers into col. A

2. populate col.D with a duplicate of the comments cell on the same row with each euipment number

3. leave an empty row between each "set" of equipment numbers

I know this is a step by step process and getting those numbers out is my priority. Can someone help me on this one?

This is the formula I've pieced together

=MID(E2,FIND("f",E2,FIND("f",E2)-1),FIND(".",E2,FIND(".",E2)))



Ive attached an example with before and after goals

Thank you!

[Ron Coderre]

It would be really helpful if you posted a sample list that is indicative of the variations.
Even better would be a sample workbook.

[Jonmo1]

Can you post some examples of the string, and your expected results?
You can attach a sample book too, that would be very helpful.

[steik]

the attachments I meant for the original post

[steik]

I apologize, was disconnected - here they are. I put the equipment numbers in bold for ease of identifying them here - unfortunately they weren't that way when originally entered - also, the second "set" in the worksheet I titled "objective" is only a copy of the first set for the purpose of showing the general objective