You might also be able to do it with some kind of naive approach: import to excel as a space-delimited file; whatever the rightmost column ends up being, go one to the right, then you should be able to use the MAX() function (perhaps with some embellishment to ignore non-numeric text) to pick out the largest number from the imported cells. Then sort on the new column. On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 11:38 AM, Cary Gordon <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > If you want to stay in Excel, you can likely do this with Powershell, > which supports regex. > > Thanks, > > Cary > > > On Jul 2, 2013, at 8:02 AM, "Harper, Cynthia" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > > Is there a way to return (in Excel, if possible) the largest 4-digit > number (by word boundaries) in a string? I've extracted the 863 fields > from Millennium for my active periodicals, and want to find the latest year > in each run. I'm willing to estimate it by taking the largest 4-digit > number in the string. I'm doing this in Excel. Any help? > > > > Cindy Harper > > Electronic Services and Serials Librarian > > Virginia Theological Seminary > > 3737 Seminary Road > > Alexandria VA 22304 > > 703-461-1794 > > [log in to unmask] >