Finding text within a cell part 2: the FIND function

By Neil Shorney, Director, Naturally Sales Ltd.

Continuing our theme of finding text within a cell, we’ll look now at the FIND function. The FIND function allows us to see where in a cell’s text a certain string is found. For example, if we look for the letter “t” within the word “Date”, it would return a “3”, because “t” is the third letter of “date”. It’s constructed like this: =FIND(text,within_cell), or =FIND(“t”,A3) where A3 contains the word “Date” If Excel is unable to find the text you’re looking for, it will return an error message. In a future e-tip, we’ll look at how we can combine the FIND and IFERROR functions to see whether or not certain cells contain certain words.