If you work with large spreadsheets, you probably know that specific words, text strings or formulas can often be difficult to find. The same applies to typos and coding errors. Of course, you can always use the standard Ctrl + F shortcut to search your spreadsheet. However, this keyboard shortcut is not useful if you only want to search a certain range of cells or a specific section of text.
In this case, the standard search or find and replace function has clear limitations. For example, if you want to replace “and” with “or”, “sand” would also be changed to “sor”. This makes it difficult to find errors in large documents or long lines of code.
The Excel SEARCH function is useful if you need to analyze text for statistical purposes and want to know where a letter or word, character string, or number appears in the text. Excel SEARCH is especially helpful when you’re creating and analyzing content.