Thank you.

I hate to ask for programming and debugging help, but since I don't fully
understand the formula, I'm afraid I have no choice.

I've discovered I have some error values in my data, which I didn't describe
in my original post. In particular, I have some values which, due to input
errors, do not contain the 7-digit numeric string. Your current formula
handles them this way:

For example, "HNRAMUS requested authority of ICIEMERG for reason HNRAMUS
ICIEMERG 'to fix OTPROC issue for P0CALC. 03/12/09 23:08 QPGMR" generates
"0CALC."

What I'd like is to return a zero in those cases (or some other special
value) - not a #N/A or some other error value.

Thanks again. I'm grateful for your help.

Eric


"JLatham" wrote:


=IF(MIN(SEARCH({0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9},A1&"012345678 9"))LEN(A1),0,MID(A1,MIN(SEARCH({0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7, 8,9},A1&"0123456789")),7))

That formula assumes your text entry is in A1. It also assumes that the
first numeric digit is the 1st digit in the 7 digit number you need to
extract. If there are any other digits ahead of that group, it will return
the wrong results.

Hope that helps. I actually found it in a posting by Mike White of the UK
on another site.

"Eric_NY" wrote:

,I'm using Outlook 2003.

I have a column containing free-format text values. (Example: "HNSMUPP
requested authority of ICIEMERG for reason HNSMUPP ICIEMERG 1026382 - RST
OF GUS, CMC FROM AFTSAVE. 03/07/09 06:51 QPGMR I5IPRD2A"). I need to find and
extract the 7-digit numeric value (in this example: 1026382) into another
cell.

Any suggestions? Can this be done with Excel built-in functions?

Thanks.