[FRIAM] Find String in Spreadsheet

Brent Auble brent at auble.net
Sat Nov 26 11:02:38 EST 2022


If you just want to find something, using the Find option from the menu will work and it should give you the option of searching within the current sheet or across all sheets in the workbook. If there are multiple results, it should pop up a docked window at the bottom of the spreadsheet to show everything it's found.
However, if you want to do it programmatically, I'm not sure if any of the built-in functions (formulas) will handle that well, mostly because of the complexity of handling multiple results. Excel functions try really hard to just return single values so they can populate just the cell they're in. There are some exceptions, where a formula will run and put its results in multiple other cells, but those are uncommon because they can indiscriminately overwrite existing cell values.
The is likely a capability in the Visual Basic language used for scripting Excel to handle searching, but it's not something I've used before (despite having done a good bit of Excel VBA in the past).
What are you trying to accomplish?
Thanks,
Brent

 
 
  On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 10:42 AM, Frank Wimberly<wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:   I used to know Excel pretty well but that was decades ago.  I want to find a given string, say "Wimberly" in a large spreadsheet.  How do I do that simply?  FIND function wants to provide the location within a larger string of a substring.  I want something like the Unix "grep' command.  

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