SEARCH or FIND in Excel?

SEARCH or FIND in Excel?

The =SEARCH and =FIND functionality in Excel may sound very similar, and they are.

I use =SEARCH when I’m trying to find text regardless of case i.e. upper case or lower case.

I use =FIND when I want to find text in a specific case.

In most cases I would use =SEARCH.

For example, if I were to use the following formulae:

Note: you can press Ctrl + Tilde Key (the Tilde Key is the key above the Tab key)to show formulas in Excel, and to hide them again.

The results would be as such:

So hopefully the above shows that =SEARCH is probably more widely used as it picks up all text matches. If you’re looking for an exact case match use =FIND.

Ian Jamieson avatar

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