They could come with ASCII and non-ASCII characters littered in them and could come in metric as well, though never metric and Imperial mixed. For instance, a simple version would be the string ' OD2.345 ID.785 TH.047' and I need the three numbers from that, in order.

In my case I need to take part descriptive information and extract the required information. Since they return either True or False values, any of these approaches (formula or user-defined function) could be used in conjunction with conditional formatting to make formatting changes to your part numbers. Thus, if you wanted to evaluate the cell at A1, you could use the following in your macro: If a disallowed character is detected, the loop is exited early and a False value is returned. The macro examines whatever is passed to it, comparing each character in the string to a list of allowed characters (in the constant sAllowed). If InStr(sAllowed, Mid(sRaw, X, 1)) = 0 Then Exit For While there are any number of ways that such a macro could be approached, here's a rather easy method:įunction DigitsOnly(sRaw As String) As BooleanĬonst sAllowed As String = '0123456789 -/' You could also use a simple macro to figure out if a cell contains only digits and your allowed characters. All of the following formulas can do the trick quite nicely:

The easiest way to figure out if a given cell contains only the allowable characters and digits is to use a formula that removes the non-digit permissible characters and then sees if the resulting value is numeric. Thus, a cell containing 123-45 would show as containing only digits, while 123AB-45 would not. Chris needs a way to identify if a cell contains only digits, without taking the special characters into account. They can also contain special characters such as dashes, slashes, and spaces. These cells can contain either digits or characters, in any combination. Chris has a large number of cells that contain part numbers.

Finding hidden characters in excel 2013