Search for any of multiple possible texts within a cell

[MichaelTman]

I have a column of cells containing various characters, could possibly be numbers, letters or punctuation - and of varying lengths. Each may contain 1 of the following: say, AB, CD, CF, DT, LM for sake of this example. A cell can contain none of these or 1 of these, but never more than 1.

Column might look something like this:

xxxAByz
wCDjkli
aa-aa-aa-DTqrstttt
wxyz

(First contains AB, second CD, third DT and fourth none. A cell could never read ABxxCD.)

What I would like to accomplish is to pull out the 2-letter code and dump it to another cell. Once I have the formula to do this, I'm sure it would be just another small addition to obtain a result of "none" if the 2-letter text did not exist within the cell.

I've tried a series of "Find" functions but my version of Excel will not allow more than 5 or 6 in the same formula - in my actual spreadsheet, the are more than 15 2-letter combinations. In addition, I tried "Search" and "Match" functions, but realized these did not work. Other than splitting the "Find" formulas into separate columns, I'd like to get everything into one column. So, the result of the above example would give me:

AB
CD
DT
none

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

 

[kpark91]

Try
=MID(A2, FIND("Yoursearchstring", A2), LEN("Yoursearchstring"))

 

[MichaelTman]

Thanks for the quick reply, but I think I wasn't quite clear. I want to search for 15 different possible "Yoursearchstring" at the same time. In other words, I want to find "AB" or "CD" or "DT", etc. and pull out whichever appears.