searching for dates to trigger an action.

jhicks5charternet 

There are several challenges here. Getting the dates to be extracted from the text is one of them.

The file attached has one possible solution for that.

The bigger problem, though, is that the dates you want to work with are before 1990 and the Excel date numbering system starts on January 1, 1990. Any date before that is not recognized by Excel natively.

I did not work on a solution for that, but I found this article that may be a good starting point.

https://exceluser.com/1057/how-to-work-with-dates-before-1900-in-excel/

Power Query recognizes dates before 1990 and can handle the filtering aspect very easily.

Two challenges there: Power Query functionality in Excel for Mac is limited, and when you load your data into Excel you would have to convert those dates to text. But if all you care about is to find those dates, you can do that in Power Query and then have the results loaded as text into Excel.

I hope this helps.