Myrna,

Have you tried it? It works like charm to me in either case (Excel 2000
SP-3).

KL

"Myrna Larson" wrote in message
...
Isn't that solution also subject to this problem: "although if any of
these
items contains a letter rather than a number it will fail" ?

On Mon, 15 Nov 2004 15:30:33 +0100, "KL" wrote:

try this:

=COUNTIF(A1;"???.???.????.??????.???.??.???")= 1

Regards,
KL

"quartz" wrote in message
...
Thanks Tom.

Yes, the periods are hard written into the cells. I guess I could use
MID
to
ensure that they are there and match the positions of the periods rather
than
looking at the overall pattern.

This may be close enough, although if any of these items contains a
letter
rather than a number it will fail. If you have any other ideas please
let
me
know.

Thanks again.

"Tom Ogilvy" wrote:

are the periods in the cell or are they produced through formatting.

If in the cell, you could use an AND statement

=AND(mid(A1,4,1)=".",Mid(A1,8,1)=".", . . .

It depends on what the possibilities are.

But the simple answer is that there is no built in function that is
designed
to do this.

--
Regards,
Tom Ogilvy



"quartz" wrote in message
...
I need a spreadsheet function or formula that can match by a pattern.
Is
there such a thing? I have looked at FIND and SEARCH, but for these
you
need
to specify exactly your search string, you can't just indicate a
pattern
to
match.

For example, I need to test to determine if a cell contains a series
of
numbers in the following pattern:

###.###.####.######.###.##.###

If so, then evaluate to ONE or TRUE or whatever, if not then ZERO or
FALSE
or whatever. NOTE: The above string could contain any series of
digits,
I
just need to be sure all the "#" signs are numbers and that they are
in
the
pattern shown above.

Your assistance is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.