Finding a word in excel

When working with Excel, we see so many peculiar situations. One of those situations is searching for the particular text in the cell. The first thing that comes to mind when we say we want to search for a specific text in the worksheet is the “Find and Replace” method in Excel, which is the most popular one. But Ctrl + F can find the text you are looking for but cannot go beyond that. So, for example, if the cell contains certain words, you may want the result in the next cell as “TRUE” or “FALSE.” So, Ctrl + F stops there.

Here, we will take you through the formulas to search for the particular text in the cell value and arrive at the result.

You can download this Search For Text Excel Template here – Search For Text Excel Template

Which Formula Can Tell Us A Cell Contains Specific Text?

It is a question we have seen many times in Excel forums. The first formula that came to mind was the “FIND” function.

So, in the IF condition, we have supplied the result as “Text Found” if the value “best” is found. Otherwise, we have provided the result as “Not Found.”

But, here we have a problem, even though we have supplied the result as “Not Found,” if the text is still not found, we are getting the error value as #VALUE!.

So, nobody wants to have an error value in their Excel sheet. Therefore, we must enclose the formula with the ISNUMERIC function to overcome this error value.

The ISNUMERIC function evaluates whether the FIND function returns the number or not. If the FIND function returns the number, it will supply TRUE to the IF condition or else FALSE condition. Based on the result provided by the ISNUMERIC function, the IF condition will return the result accordingly.

We can also use the IFERROR function in excelThe IFERROR function in Excel checks a formula (or a cell) for errors and returns a specified value in place of the error.read more to deal with error values instead of ISNUMERIC. For example, the below formula will also return “Not Found” if the FIND function returns the error value.

Alternatives to FIND Function

Alternative #1 – Excel Search Function

Instead of the FIND function, we can also use the SEARCH function in excelSearch function gives the position of a substring in a given string when we give a parameter of the position to search from. As a result, this formula requires three arguments. The first is the substring, the second is the string itself, and the last is the position to start the search.read more to search the particular text in the string. The syntax of the SEARCH function is the same as the FIND function.

Supply the “find_text” as “Best.”

The “within_text” is our cell reference.

Even the SEARCH function returns an error value as #VALUE! If the finding text “best” is not found. As we have seen above, we need to enclose the formula with ISNUMERIC or IFERROR functions.

Alternative #2 – Excel Countif Function

Another way to search for a particular text is using the COUNTIF functionThe COUNTIF function in Excel counts the number of cells within a range based on pre-defined criteria. It is used to count cells that include dates, numbers, or text. For example, COUNTIF(A1:A10,”Trump”) will count the number of cells within the range A1:A10 that contain the text “Trump”
read more. This function works without any error.

In the range, the argument selects the cell reference.

In the criteria column, we need to use a wildcard in excelIn Excel, wildcards are the three special characters asterisk, question mark, and tilde. Asterisk denotes multiple characters, a question mark denotes a single character, and a tilde denotes the identification of a wild card character.read more because we are just finding the part of the string value, so enclose the word “best” with an asterisk (*) wildcard.

This formula will return the word “best” count in the selected cell value. Since we have only one “best” value, we will get only 1 as the count.

We can apply only the IF condition to get the result without error.

Highlight the Cell which has a Particular Text Value

If you are not a fan of formulas, you can highlight the cell with a particular word. For example, to highlight the cell with the word “best,” we need to use conditional formatting in excelConditional formatting is a technique in Excel that allows us to format cells in a worksheet based on certain conditions. It can be found in the styles section of the Home tab.read more.

First, select the data cells and click “Conditional Formatting” > “New Rule.”

Under “New Rule,” select the “Format only cells that contain” option.

From the first dropdown, select “Specific Text.”

The formula section enters the text we search for in double quotes with the equal sign. =’best.’

Then, click on “FORMAT” and choose the formatting style.

Click on “OK.” It will highlight all the cells which have the word “best.”

Using various techniques, we can search the particular text in Excel.

Recommended Articles

This article is a guide to Search For Text in Excel. Here, we discuss the top three methods to search the cell value for a specific text and arrive at the result with practical examples and a downloadable Excel template. You may learn more about Excel from the following articles: –

• Find Links in Excel
• Using Find and Select in Excel
• Search Box in Excel

Question: What formula tells you if A1 contains the text «apple»?

This is a surprisingly tricky problem in Excel. The «obvious» answer is to use the FIND function to «look» for the text, like this:

=FIND("apple",A1)

Then, if you want a TRUE/FALSE result, add the IF function:

=IF(FIND("apple",A1),TRUE)

This works great if «apple» is found – FIND returns a number to indicate the position, and IF calls it good and returns TRUE.

But FIND has an annoying quirk – if it doesn’t find «apple», it returns the #VALUE error.  This means that the formula above doesn’t return FALSE when text isn’t found, it returns #VALUE:

FIND returns the position of the text (if found), but #VALUE if not found.

Unfortunately, this error appears even if we wrap the FIND function in the IF function.

Grrrr. Nobody likes to see errors in their spreadsheets.

(There may be some good reason for this, but returning zero would be much nicer.)

So, what to do? Well, in a classic, counter-intuitive Excel move, you can trap the #VALUE error with the ISNUMBER function, like this:

=ISNUMBER(FIND("apple",A1))

Now ISNUMBER returns TRUE when FIND yields a number, and FALSE when FIND throws the error.

Another way with COUNTIF

If all that seems a little crazy, you can also the COUNTIF function to find text:

=COUNTIF(A1,"*apple*")

It might seem strange to use COUNTIF like this, since we’re just counting one cell. But COUNTIF does the job well – if «apple» is found, it returns 1, if not, it returns zero.

For many situations (e.g. conditional formatting) a 1 or 0 result will be just fine. But if you want to force a TRUE/FALSE result, just wrap with IF:

=IF(COUNTIF(A1,"*apple*"),TRUE)

Now we get TRUE if «apple» is found, FALSE if not:

Note that COUNTIF supports wildcards – in fact, you must use wildcards to get the «contains» behavior, by adding an asterisk to either side of the text you’re looking for. On the downside, COUNTIF isn’t case-sensitive, so you’ll need to use FIND if case is important.

Other examples

So what can you do with these kind of formulas? A lot!

Here are a few examples (with full explanations) to inspire you:

• Count cells that contain specific text
• Sum cells that contain specific text
• Test a cell to see if contains one of many things
• Highlight cells that contain specific text
• Build a search box to highlight data (video)

Logical confusion?

If you need to brush up on how logical formulas work, see this video. It’s kind of boring, but it runs through a lot of examples.

Other formulas

If you like formulas (who doesn’t?!), we maintain a big list of examples.

Cell contains specific text

Summary

To check if a cell contains specific text (i.e. a substring), you can use the SEARCH function together with the ISNUMBER function. In the example shown, the formula in D5 is:

This formula returns TRUE if the substring is found, and FALSE if not. Note the SEARCH function is not case-sensitive. See below for a case-sensitive formula.

Generic formula

Explanation

In this example, the goal is to test a value in a cell to see if it contains a specific substring. Excel contains two functions designed to check the occurrence of one text string inside another: the SEARCH function and the FIND function. Both functions return the position of the substring if found as a number, and a #VALUE! error if the substring is not found. The difference is that the SEARCH function supports wildcards but is not case-sensitive, while the FIND function is case-sensitive but does not support wildcards. The general approach with either function is to use the ISNUMBER function to check for a numeric result (a match) and return TRUE or FALSE.

SEARCH function (not case-sensitive)

The SEARCH function is designed to look inside a text string for a specific substring. If SEARCH finds the substring, it returns a position of the substring in the text as a number. If the substring is not found, SEARCH returns a #VALUE error. For example:

To force a TRUE or FALSE result, we use the ISNUMBER function. ISNUMBER returns TRUE for numeric values and FALSE for anything else. So, if SEARCH finds the substring, it returns the position as a number, and ISNUMBER returns TRUE:

If SEARCH doesn’t find the substring, it returns an error, which causes the ISNUMBER to return FALSE.

Wildcards

Although SEARCH is not case-sensitive, it does support wildcards (*?

). For example, the question mark (?) wildcard matches any one character. The formula below looks for a 3-character substring beginning with «x» and ending in «y»:

The asterisk (*) wildcard matches zero or more characters. This wildcard is not as useful in the SEARCH function because SEARCH already looks for a substring. For example, it might seem like the following formula will test for a value that ends with «z»:

However, because SEARCH automatically looks for a substring, the following formulas all return 1 as a result, even though the text in the first formula is the only text that ends with «z»:

This means the asterisk (*) is not a reliable way to test for «ends with». However, you an use the the asterisk (*) wildcard like this:

Here we are looking for «x», «2», and «b» in that order, with any number of characters in between. Finally, you can use the tilde (

) as an escape character to indicate that the next character is a literal like this:

The above formulas use SEARCH to find a literal asterisk (*), question mark (?) , and tilde (

FIND function (case-sensitive)

Like the SEARCH function, the FIND function returns the position of a substring in text as a number, and an error if the substring is not found. However, unlike the SEARCH function, the FIND function respects case:

To make a case-sensitive version of the formula, just replace the SEARCH function with the FIND function in the formula above:

The result is a case-sensitive search:

If cell contains

To return a custom result when a cell contains specific text, add the IF function like this:

Instead of returning TRUE or FALSE, the formula above will return «Yes» if substring is found and «No» if not.

With hardcoded search string

To test for a hardcoded substring, enclose the text in double quotes («»). For example, to check A1 for the text «apple» use:

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Excel has some wonderful formulas that can help you slice and dice the text data.

Sometimes, when you have the text data, you may want to extract the first word from the text string in a cell.

There are multiple ways you can do this in Excel (using a combination of formulas, using Find and Replace, and using Flash Fill)

In this tutorial, I will show you some really simple ways to extract the first word from a text string in Excel.

This Tutorial Covers:

Suppose you have the following dataset, where you want to get the first word from each cell.

The below formula will do this:

Let me explain how this formula works.

The FIND part of the formula is used to find the position of the space character in the text string. When the formula finds the position of the space character, the LEFT function is used to extract all the characters before that first space character in the text string.

While the LEFT formula alone should be enough, it will give you an error in case there is only one word in the cell and no space characters.

To handle this situation, I have wrapped the LEFT formula in the IFERROR formula, which simply returns the original cell content (as there are no space characters indicating that it’s either empty or has only one word).

One good thing about this method is that the result is dynamic. This means that in case you change the original text string in the cells in column A, the formula in column B will automatically update and give the correct result.

In case you don’t want the formula, you can convert it into values.

Extract the First Word Using Find and Replace

Another quick method to extract the first word is to use Find and Replace to remove everything except the first word.

Suppose you have the dataset as shown below:

Below are the steps to use Find and Replace to only get the first word and remove everything else:

1. Copy the text from column A to column B. This is to make sure that we have the original data as well.
2. Select all the cells in Column B where you want to get the first word
3. Click the Home tab
4. In the Editing group, click on Find and Select option and then click on Replace. This will open the Find & Replace dialog box.
5. In the Find what field, enter * (one space character followed by the asterisk sign)
6. Leave the Replace with field empty
7. Click on Replace All button.

The above steps would remove everything except the first word in the cells.

How does this work?

In Find what field, we have used a space character followed by the asterisk sign. The asterisk sign (*) is a wild card character that represents any number of characters.

So when we ask Excel to find cells that contain space character followed by the asterisk sign and replace it with blank, it finds the first space character and removes everything after it – leaving us with the first word only.

And in case you a cell that has no text or only one word with no space characters, the above steps would not make any changes to it.

Another really simple and fast method to extract the first word using Flash Fill.

Flash Fill was introduced in Excel 2013 and is available in all the versions after that. It helps in text manipulation by identifying the pattern that you’re trying to achieve and fills it for the entire column.

For example, suppose you have the below dataset and you want to only extract the first word.

Below are the steps to do this:

1. In cell B2, which is the adjacent column of our data, manually enter ‘Marketing’ (which is the expected result)
2. In cell B3, enter ‘HR’
3. Select the range B2:B10
4. Click on the Home tab
5. In the Editing group, click on the Fill drop-down
6. Click on Flash Fill option

The above steps would fill all the cells with the first word from the adjacent column (column A).

Note: When typing the expected result in the second cell in column B, you may see all text in all the cells in a light gray color. That is the result you will get if you hit the enter key right away. In case you don’t see the gray line, use the Flash Fill option in the ribbon.

So these are three simple methods to extract the first word from a text string in Excel.

I hope you found this tutorial useful!

Other Excel tutorials you may like:

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Use Excel built-in functions to find data in a table or a range of cells

Summary

This step-by-step article describes how to find data in a table (or range of cells) by using various built-in functions in Microsoft Excel. You can use different formulas to get the same result.

Create the Sample Worksheet

This article uses a sample worksheet to illustrate Excel built-in functions. Consider the example of referencing a name from column A and returning the age of that person from column C. To create this worksheet, enter the following data into a blank Excel worksheet.

You will type the value that you want to find into cell E2. You can type the formula in any blank cell in the same worksheet.

Term Definitions

This article uses the following terms to describe the Excel built-in functions:

The whole lookup table

The value to be found in the first column of Table_Array.

Lookup_Array
-or-
Lookup_Vector

The range of cells that contains possible lookup values.

The column number in Table_Array the matching value should be returned for.

3 (third column in Table_Array)

Result_Array
-or-
Result_Vector

A range that contains only one row or column. It must be the same size as Lookup_Array or Lookup_Vector.

A logical value (TRUE or FALSE). If TRUE or omitted, an approximate match is returned. If FALSE, it will look for an exact match.

This is the reference from which you want to base the offset. Top_Cell must refer to a cell or range of adjacent cells. Otherwise, OFFSET returns the #VALUE! error value.

This is the number of columns, to the left or right, that you want the upper-left cell of the result to refer to. For example, «5» as the Offset_Col argument specifies that the upper-left cell in the reference is five columns to the right of reference. Offset_Col can be positive (which means to the right of the starting reference) or negative (which means to the left of the starting reference).

Functions

LOOKUP()

The LOOKUP function finds a value in a single row or column and matches it with a value in the same position in a different row or column.

The following is an example of LOOKUP formula syntax:

The following formula finds Mary’s age in the sample worksheet:

The formula uses the value «Mary» in cell E2 and finds «Mary» in the lookup vector (column A). The formula then matches the value in the same row in the result vector (column C). Because «Mary» is in row 4, LOOKUP returns the value from row 4 in column C (22).

NOTE: The LOOKUP function requires that the table be sorted.

For more information about the LOOKUP function, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

VLOOKUP()

The VLOOKUP or Vertical Lookup function is used when data is listed in columns. This function searches for a value in the left-most column and matches it with data in a specified column in the same row. You can use VLOOKUP to find data in a sorted or unsorted table. The following example uses a table with unsorted data.

The following is an example of VLOOKUP formula syntax:

The following formula finds Mary’s age in the sample worksheet:

The formula uses the value «Mary» in cell E2 and finds «Mary» in the left-most column (column A). The formula then matches the value in the same row in Column_Index. This example uses «3» as the Column_Index (column C). Because «Mary» is in row 4, VLOOKUP returns the value from row 4 in column C (22).

For more information about the VLOOKUP function, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

INDEX() and MATCH()

You can use the INDEX and MATCH functions together to get the same results as using LOOKUP or VLOOKUP.

The following is an example of the syntax that combines INDEX and MATCH to produce the same results as LOOKUP and VLOOKUP in the previous examples:

The following formula finds Mary’s age in the sample worksheet:

The formula uses the value «Mary» in cell E2 and finds «Mary» in column A. It then matches the value in the same row in column C. Because «Mary» is in row 4, the formula returns the value from row 4 in column C (22).

NOTE: If none of the cells in Lookup_Array match Lookup_Value («Mary»), this formula will return #N/A.
For more information about the INDEX function, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

OFFSET() and MATCH()

You can use the OFFSET and MATCH functions together to produce the same results as the functions in the previous example.

The following is an example of syntax that combines OFFSET and MATCH to produce the same results as LOOKUP and VLOOKUP:

This formula finds Mary’s age in the sample worksheet:

The formula uses the value «Mary» in cell E2 and finds «Mary» in column A. The formula then matches the value in the same row but two columns to the right (column C). Because «Mary» is in column A, the formula returns the value in row 4 in column C (22).

For more information about the OFFSET function, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

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