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SDj1's avatar
SDj1
Copper Contributor
Jan 21, 2026
Solved

Extract mm.yyyy from text

Hello, I have a column with text with different length, which contains month and year in a format mm.yyyy and it could be located at a different place within the cell. How can I extract the mm.yyyy ...
excel
  • John Gruber's avatar
    John Gruber
    Jan 22, 2026

    =REGEXEXTRACT(A1, "\d{2}\.\d{4}")

SDj1's avatar
SDj1
Copper Contributor
Jan 26, 2026

Hi Lorenzo​ 

Thanks for navigating me trough this exercise. The LAMBDA solution that you provided below is too complex for me and I couldn't use it. What was helpful was the =REGEXEXTRACT(A1, "\d{2}\.\d{4}"), where I used "." or "_" to extract some of the data. For the months listed with their names, I used filter for each and separate month and then I copied the mm.yyyy manually. The problem with my database was that the dates appeared not only after "dated" but after/before different other words in various sentences.

Lorenzo's avatar
Lorenzo
Silver Contributor
Jan 26, 2026

Hi SDj1​ 

Obviously your samples didn't reflect all the variations that exist in your DB - never easy

I hope you sorted it out finally. Otherwise & if your DB isn't top secret feel free to share it (i.e. with OneDrive, Google Drive or the like) and I'll see if there a way to do something without manual operations

Cheers
Lz.

  • SDj1's avatar
    SDj1
    Copper Contributor
    Jan 26, 2026

    Thank you Lorenzo​ 

    Yes, the database is huge but unfortunately, it is confidential and I couldn't share it. Fortunately, I have a wonderful team and we agreed internally to write the dates in these files using one and the same format mm.yyyy, so that in the future this extraction to be a lot easier.