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]
>