AFAIK, Excel has no built in regex capabilities so you'd need to call
vbscript from Excel to do this.

In any case, you'll need to write an actual program to evaluate each line
since multiple values can occur in the same line. This will be easier if
done as text than in VBA. Besides, the data in Excel came from Mil in text
to begin with.

There are many ways to do what you want, but perl would be hard to beat for
this use case

Kyle
On Jul 2, 2013 10:02 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]
>