Hi all. New to Excel, but formerly a programmer. I've got Excel 2003
(?) and have begun using it to pull data from an external database. I
can't seem to find a good reference to the features/limitations of MS
Query. It appears a lot of material points to Access (which our IT guy
won't let me use). Also I'm stuck with using whatever s/w is on our
weird server - I can't add or upgrade any apps.

Currently I'm looking at a lot of ugly data stored as long strings,
pulling 'possible matches' with MS Query, and then using a VBscript in
a formula to regex the text to find the specific things I want.
Naturally I'd prefer to be able to use regex right in the SQL query,
but I don't know how to begin. I don't know what (if any) regex
capabilites can be used in Query.

For example, I've got text that looks like this:

<garbage<useful value 1<unique token<useful value 2<garbage

I use MS Query to find the <unique token, and then the regexp in a
VBScript formula to find the useful values 1 & 2. Not the cleanest
solution, to be sure.

TIA
Mike