Search sheet for specific data

[jinga]

Hi there,

Newcomer to the forum here so firstly 'Hi!'

Secondly apologies for putting this here. I am unsure which subforum this should go in.

My problem is this. I have a spreadhseet of about 150000 rows. This sheet contains a lot of random data that has been added in over time by my predecessors.
The data includes stuff like email addresses, realworld addresses, telephone numbers etc.

What I am trying to do is find a way to get excel to go through the sheet and pull out all the data that matches a specific criteria (IE all strings of numbers between say 7 and 15 digits long) so that I can go though this huge sheet and essentially harvest the specific information I want and dump it either into a new worksheet or page.

My thought is if I know how to do this once then all I have to do is change the criteria to harvest different sorts of data from the sheet.

The only one I don't know how to do is to harvest names since I figure I would need to essentially tell Excel what is a name (IE Excel would need to refer to a list of names in order to recognise that what it is looking at is a name)

Once again, sorry for sticking this here. I will happily remove and repost if theres a better location for this question.

Cheers!!

Jin

[zbor]

You can create in next column formula for determine lenght =LEN(A1)

and then put filter in first row and filter out whatever you need.

[oldchippy]

Hi jinga,

Welcome to the forum, Excel Hero Daniel Ferry only the other day posted this on his website, seems like this could be something that could be adapted for your purposes maybe?

[jinga]

Many thanks... I will take a look at that blog today.

Where I think the difference between what I need and what is being described here, however, is that I am not looking for a specific known string of data. (IE/ I am not searching a spreadsheet for the number '07754190980' rather I am trying to find all instances of a string of digits that is 11 digits long. This way I can find ALL telephone numbers and not just this specific example)

Does that make sense?