在excel单元格中提取复杂分隔符之间的文本

Question

I have an exported report from a ticketing tool in Excel.

Each row corresponds to one ticket in the system.

Column I of each row contains the contents of a Free Text field in the ticketing system, containing date and time stamped comments from the support staff working on the ticket sorted chronologically, most recent first.

The text field contains multiple entries separated by a time stamp using a uniform format. Each entry may or may not contain multiple lines and line breaks.

Can anyone suggest a way to extract the most recent entry from each cell and put them in their own cell in Column J. Essentially I need everything from and including the first time stamp to the start of but excluding the next time stamp down.

Sample cell content below.

12-10-2018 14:12:09 - Joe Bloggs (Customer Updates) No change this week as project owner has been on leave.

05-10-2018 08:24:24 - Jane Blogges (Customer Updates) Supplier has produced a more detail proposal for the solution, including a move to an integrated service built on the exiting API's

Costs yet to be agreed.

28-09-2018 14:21:35 - Joe Bloggs (Customer Updates) Discussions continue this week around the suitability of the proposed solution.

There is still no clear plan for the project and no overall design document.

20-09-2018 11:24:55 -Joe Bloggs (Customer Updates) While a number of meetings to discuss requirements and feasibility have been held no high level design has been proposed and a number of KDD's remain outstanding.

17-09-2018 09:59:26 - Joe Bloggs (Customer Updates) Ticket Accepted

Desired out put from this cell would be

12-10-2018 14:12:09 - Joe Bloggs (Customer Updates) No change this week as project owner has been on leave.

It has to be done this way as the PHB responsible wants a "Management Report" without having to actually log into the ticket system themselves.

Answer 1

It could be done with a formula. If the text with carriage returns is in cell A2 for example, try this formula. Get the substring starting with the first number and ending with the first carriage return after that first number. Tweak as necessary of course.

=MID(A2, MIN(SEARCH({0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9},A2&"0123456789")), FIND(CHAR(10), A2,MIN(SEARCH({0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9},A2&"0123456789")))-1)

Answer 2

Came up with an answer in the end anyway, using LEFT and FIND after I spotted that there was a reliable repeatable pattern in the string by using "-20" from the year in the date stamp. Yes it will break when we get to 2100 but if it's still being used then, god help us all.

=LEFT(A1,IFERROR(((FIND("-20",A1,10))-6),LEN(A1)))