[...]
though I like your solution idea this may not work in non-English
countries. e.g. for the following IP address
172.24.1.12

your formula returns a date value ("1-Jan-2004") if the dot is used
for delimiting the date parts.

Part of me wants to respond that continental Europe has lost whatever
contest there may have been to establish computer and IP standards,
and the sooner y'all recognize that '.' is the decimal point and ','
the thousands separator, and '/' or '-' date component separators,
the better for all.

lol
probably the same chance that the 'Americans' will all adapt to the
metric system and forget about feet, inches, gallons, etc :-)


However, I'll address your point. If you live in some backwards
region that doesn't use US-standard settings by default, and you need
to work with data using US-standard separators (such as the .s in IP
addresses), then change those US-standard separators to your local
separators as the initial step.

Now part of me wants to respond that 'old Europe' is in several areas
more advanced than the US but this is definetely not the right place to
discuss this and both of us would find enough examples to verify our
points :-)


=INT(--MID(SUBSTITUTE(x,".",","),
FIND(CHAR(127),SUBSTITUTE(x,".",CHAR(127),2))+1,3) )

just a final comment about the working formula. I think it works also
without using '--' as INT will do this conversion anyway.

Frank