Forum Discussion
searching for dates to trigger an action.
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.
- Correct! My typo above. Sorry for the confusion.
- Thank you.That is good to know but the dates I need to look for are (<= 1875) and (>= 1899).
jhicks5charternet
If you only want to search a value in your Text >=1875 an <=1895 you can use this formula in your conditional formating rule:
=SUM(IFERROR(FIND(SEQUENCE(21;;1875);B2);0)) < maybe you have to repace semicolon with comma- Chris, I Tried using The above formula after substitution of the "," and it worked somewhat. It did not pick the proper dates. In fact I can't figure out why it picked what it did, /Users/john/Desktop/Screen Shot 2021-07-07 at 1.36.38 PM (2).png
John
