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FIND and SEARCH in Excel: Locate Text in a Cell

FIND and SEARCH return the position of a piece of text inside a cell. That's useful on its own, but mainly as a building block: to check if a cell contains a word, or to extract everything before or after a character.

FIND & SEARCH · 2 min read

Syntax

Both return a number: the position of the first character of the match. =FIND("@", "anna@example.com") returns 5. If the text isn't found, both return #VALUE!.

The difference

In most everyday cases you want SEARCH, because "Urgent" and "urgent" should both count.

Check if a cell contains a word

Wrap SEARCH in ISNUMBER: a number means found, an error means not found.

Returns TRUE or FALSE. Inside IF:

This is also the way to filter on partial text with FILTER and to use "contains" in conditional formatting.

Extract text before or after a character

• Username from an email: =LEFT(A2, FIND("@", A2)-1) returns "anna".
• Domain: =MID(A2, FIND("@", A2)+1, 100) returns "example.com".

See LEFT, RIGHT and MID. In Microsoft 365 and Excel 2024, TEXTBEFORE and TEXTAFTER do this without FIND.

Find the second occurrence

Use start_num to begin searching just after the first match:

In "P-104-NL" this returns 6, the position of the second dash.