Maybe this (attached) will do the trick?

On Tue, Jul 2, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Kyle Banerjee <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> I haven't used the addins, but any real regex support should allow you to
> extract multiple matches in one shot. However, you'd still need a bit of
> code to identify the max value.
>
> Kyle
> On Jul 2, 2013 10:51 AM, "Harper, Cynthia" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > I've used a couple of Add-ins for regexp in excel, but I wondered if
> > regexp had the ability to test the multiple matches in a single-line
> > expression.  But I guess that does require a multiline program - I'll use
> > VB. Thanks.
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> > Kyle Banerjee
> > Sent: Tuesday, July 02, 2013 11:47 AM
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Regular expression for maximum 4-digit number
> >
> > 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]
> > >
> >
>