Written and reviewed by FormulaCraft Team. Each formula on this page is run through our verification engine before publishing.
Last reviewed:
SEARCH
SEARCH works like FIND but ignores case and allows wildcard characters (* for any sequence, ? for any single character), making it more flexible for partial or case-insensitive lookups. Use it when the search term may appear in mixed case or when you need pattern-based matching without a full regular expression.
Excel
=SEARCH("widget",A2)Google Sheets
=SEARCH("widget",A2)✓
Verified example
Computed by a real spreadsheet engine on the sample data below.
| Description |
| Blue Widget Pro |
| Red Gadget Plus |
| Green Widget Lite |
| Yellow Doohickey |
=SEARCH("widget",A2)→6
Try it with your data
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Sample data — click any cell to edit
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How it works
- 1Enter the find_text string (supports * and ? wildcards) as the first argument.
- 2Reference the within_text cell as the second argument.
- 3Wrap in ISNUMBER to return TRUE/FALSE, or use with MID/LEFT/RIGHT to extract surrounding text.
Need a version for your data?
Try: “Check whether any product description contains the word 'widget' regardless of capitalization”