Excel tutorials

Sometimes we need to find a specific character or a group of characters in Excel. There are more than one way to do this, but here we are going to look at the =FIND function.

This particular function looks for one text string within another. It does not return the character – but its position.

The syntax is as follows:

=FIND(find_text,within_text,[start_num])

• Find_text = the character we are trying to locate
• within_text = the reference to the cell where we are looking
• start_num = this is optional – if we want to start at a certain position.

We have to keep in mind that this function is case-sensitive!

Lets take a look how this is working by a simple example.

Here we want to search for the word “Excel” in A2 and A3 – the position will be different because the function is case-sensitive.

In the first row, the position is at 11, the other one is at 19, because it searches for “Excel” and not “excel”.

The FIND-function is often used in combination with other formulas.