Filtering numerical strings

[Drofidnas]

This should be simple and maybe I'm being daft but I can't fix it.

I've got a list of 200 documents (and growing) and each applies to one or several boxes (1-19) of a process flow diagram
(ie, in box 6 of the diagram you need Doc A, B, C, F, K, in boxes 1, 2, 3, 7, 10, 15 you need Doc D, G, F etc.

The creators of the spreadsheet have put the diagram boxes in one cell separated by commas (thanks guys).

I've written a macro to filter on each box number to see which Docs are applicable and then extract them to a separate sheet, but when I filter on "contains 1" I get 10, 11, 12 up to 19 as well (obviously). When I filter on "contains 2", I get 12. etc. I can't use "equals 1" because the numbers are written as a string and the cell is greater than just a figure.

I'm considering renumbering 1-19 as A to S to get some uniqueness to the diagram boxes or introduce text into them but surely there must be a way to filter on unique numbers in a string?

Any help out there?

Many thanks.

Chris

 

[Fluff]

If the numbers are separated by a comma space, you could use a helper column with a formula like

=ISNUMBER(FIND(" 1,"," "&A2&","))

and then filter that column for true