Query for text and return corresponding value, within a date range

Question

Working on moving an excel sheet to google sheets. One of the areas I have working quite nicely in excel is finding a paycheck value out of a list of transactions. The transactions list is a running sheet from 2018. The current tab has cells A1 and A2 specifying the beginning and end days, ie 7/1/19 7/31/19. The formula takes those two dates and searches for the keywords, returns the first, second or third instance (for this formula it's the first)

Trying to figure out how to best move this type of query over to google sheets. Any advise?

=IFERROR(INDEX([Transactions.xlsx]Transactions!$D$2:$D$8996,SMALL(IF(([Transactions.xlsx]Transactions!$B$2:$B$8996="DFAS-CLEVELAND   FED SALARY ***********xxxx")+([Transactions.xlsx]Transactions!$A$2:$A$8996>=$A$1)+([Transactions.xlsx]Transactions!$A$2:$A$8996<=$A$2)=3,ROW([Transactions.xlsx]Transactions!$B$2:$B$8996)-ROW(INDEX([Transactions.xlsx]Transactions!$B$2:$B$8996,1,1))+1),1)),"None")

Answer 1

try something like:

=QUERY(2018!A:B, 
 "select B 
  where A >= date '"&TEXT(A1, "yyyy-mm-dd")&"'
    and A <= date '"&TEXT(A2, "yyyy-mm-dd")&"'
  limit 3", 0)