Finding date inconcistency's

[kogneto]

I have a complicated question. I've downloaded my transaction log from Mint.com and converted the results into a table with the headings, "Date", "Description", "Original Description", "Amount", "Type", "Account"

I've noticed though, that the "Date" column contains discrepancies with the actual date of transaction. These discrepancies show up in the "Original Description" column which contains the true date, the company name, and other identifying information.

I've tried a couple options to delete text after the space, to edit fields like "03/31 Taco Bell store#1234" down to just "03/31" but they seem to only preserve text, not numbers, before the space so it results in "Taco". Is there a way to do this to retain just the first 5 characters (none of the fields are formatted "Taco Bell 03/31" only date first, if there is a date) and delete everything after?

Edit: heres the formula I was using before
=LEFT(K1, FIND(" ",K1)-1)
I've copied the original description column to K so I can maintain the original

 

[kogneto]

OK so I was able to use the follow formula to retain just the first 5 characters, but I had to throw in an extra because it was creating a space for character 1
=REPLACE(K1,7,99,"")
then I copie/paste-special:values the cells into another column, change those to MM/DD/YYYY date format, unfortunately it also retained first five letters of text if there was any so I guess I have to go through and delete those manually?

My only real roadblock is that since I only had MM/DD to work with all dates are in 2013, is there a way to change a year for a range of cells so I can fix 2012/2011 etc? it's about 2000 rows so manual on that will suck 1000x more than manually deleting cells

Edit: AHA nevermind on that manual deletion, I added them to the table I was working with originally and sorted by oldest, then deleted the whole swath at the bottom

Edit2: hm is there a way to Find and Replace just a selection of cells? if I highlight all the 2011's that say 2013 and then run find all 2013 replace all with 2011 it just replaces everything in that column to 2011