How to Use the Find Feature in Excel 2013
When all else fails, you can use Excel 2013’s Find feature to locate specific information in the worksheet. Choose Home→Find & Select→Find or press Ctrl+F, Shift+F5, or even Alt+HFDF to open the Find and Replace dialog box.
In the Find What drop-down box of this dialog box, enter the text or values you want to locate and then click the Find Next button or press Enter to start the search. Choose the Options button in the Find and Replace dialog box to expand the search options.
When you search for a text entry with the Find and Replace feature, be mindful of whether the text or number you enter in the Find What text box is separate in its cell or occurs as part of another word or value. For example, if you enter the characters in in the Find What text box and you don’t select the Match Entire Cell Contents check box, Excel finds
The In in Regional Income 2010 in cell A1
The In in International in A8, A16, A24 and so on
The in in Total Operating Expenses in cell A25
If you select the Match Entire Cell Contents box in the Find and Replace dialog box before searching, Excel would not consider the anything in the sheet to be a match because all entries have other text surrounding the text you’re searching for. If you had the abbreviation for Indiana (IN) in a cell by itself and had chosen the Match Entire Cell Contents option, Excel would find that cell.
When you search for text, you can also specify whether you want Excel to match the case you use when entering the search text in the Find What text box. By default, Excel ignores case differences between text in cells of your worksheet and the search text you enter in the Find What text box. To conduct a case-sensitive search, you need to select the Match Case check box.
If the text or values that you want to locate in the worksheet have special formatting, you can specify the formatting to match when conducting the search.
To have Excel match the formatting assigned to a particular cell in the worksheet, follow these steps:
Click the drop-down button on the right of the Format button in the Find and Replace dialog box and choose the Choose Format from Cell option on the pop-up menu.
Excel opens the Find Format dialog box.
Click the Choose Format From Cell button at the bottom of the Find Format dialog box.
The Find Format dialog box disappears, and Excel adds an ink dropper icon to the normal white cross mouse and touch pointer.
Click the ink dropper pointer in the cell in the worksheet that contains the formatting you want to match.
The formatting in the selected worksheet appears in the Preview text box in the Find and Replace dialog box, and you can then search for that formatting in other places in the worksheet by clicking the Find Next button or by pressing Enter.
To select the formatting to match in the search from the options on the Find Format dialog box, follow these steps:
Click the Format button or click its drop-down button and choose Format from its menu.
Select the formatting options to match from the various tabs and click OK.
When you use either of these methods to select the kinds of formatting to match in your search, the No Format Set button changes to a Preview button. The word Preview in this button appears in whatever font and attributes Excel picks up from the sample cell or through your selections in the Find Format dialog box.
To reset the Find and Replace to search across all formats again, click Format→Clear Find Format, and No Form Set will appear again between the Find What and Format buttons.
When you search for values in the worksheet, be mindful of the difference between formulas and values. For example, say cell K24 of your worksheet contains the computed value $15,000. If you type 15000 in the Find What text box and press Enter to search for this value, instead of finding the value 15000 in cell K24, Excel displays an alert box with the following message:
Microsoft Excel cannot find the data you’re searching for
This is because the value in this cell is calculated by the formula
=I24*J24
The value 15000 doesn’t appear in that formula. To have Excel find any entry matching 15000 in the cells of the worksheet, you need to choose Values in the Look In drop-down menu of the Find and Replace dialog box in place of the normally used Formulas option.
If you don’t know the exact spelling of the word or name or the precise value or formula you’re searching for, you can use wildcards, which are symbols that stand for missing or unknown text. Use the question mark (?) to stand for a single unknown character; use the asterisk (*) to stand for any number of missing characters.
Suppose that you enter the following in the Find What text box and choose the Values option in the Look In drop-down menu:
7*4
Excel stops at cells that contain the values 74, 704, and 75,234. Excel even finds the text entry 782 4th Street!
If you actually want to search for an asterisk in the worksheet rather than use the asterisk as a wildcard, precede it with a tilde (~), as follows:
~*4
This arrangement enables you to search the formulas in the worksheet for one that multiplies by the number 4.
The following entry in the Find What text box finds cells that contain Jan, January, June, Janet, and so on.
J?n*
Excel Glossary
active cell
The worksheet cell that contains the cell cursor. Each worksheet can have only one active cell.
Excel Glossary
AutoComplete
A feature that looks at the entries that you make in a worksheet column and automatically duplicates them in subsequent rows whenever you start a new entry that begins with the same letter or letters as an existing entry in that column.
Excel Glossary
AutoCorrect
A feature that alerts Excel 2007 to common typing errors and your own typing errors (that you specify) and tells the program how it should automatically fix them for you.
Excel Glossary
AutoFill
An Excel 2007 feature that quickly creates a series of entries based on the data you enter in one or two cells. AutoFill works with days of the week, months of the year, yearly quarters; consecutive series of numbers; and formulas. You also can add your own custom AutoFill series.
Excel Glossary
AutoFilter
A feature in Excel 2010 that enables you to temporarily hide everything in a table except the records you specifically want to view, based on criteria you specify.
Excel Glossary
Backstage view
A new feature in Excel 2010 — accessible from the green File tab — that enables you to manage files and to view the properties and stats about the workbook file you're editing.
Excel Glossary
cell
The intersection of a column and row in the worksheet.
Excel Glossary
cell address
The cell identifier, determined by its column letter(s) followed by the row number, as in cell A1, the very first cell of each worksheet at the intersection of column A and row 1.
Excel Glossary
cell cursor
The black border that surrounds the active cell in a worksheet.
Excel Glossary
clip art
Readymade drawings, illustrations, and photos offered by Microsoft for use in Microsoft Office applications.
Excel Glossary
Compatibility Checker
A utility in Excel 2007 and 2010 that you use to find potential compatibility issues if you plan to save an Excel workbook file in the older Excel 97–2003 file format.
Excel Glossary
current cell
The worksheet cell that contains the cell cursor. Each worksheet can have only one current cell.
Excel Glossary
data table
A range of cells in a worksheet in which you enter a series of possible values that Excel plugs into a formula so you can perform what-if analysis on the data.
Excel Glossary
dialog box
A rectangular window with settings and commands that appears when you click a dialog box launcher or certain other commands on the Ribbon.
Excel Glossary
dialog box launcher
A small icon in the lower-right corner of a group of command buttons on the Ribbon that you click to access a dialog box with additional related settings and commands.
Excel Glossary
function
A part of a formula that takes a number of specific arguments and then returns a single value based on those arguments.
Excel Glossary
gallery
A drop-down list of thumbnail selections that appears when you click certain command buttons on the Ribbon.
Excel Glossary
group
A section of a tab on the Excel 2007 Ribbon that organizes related command buttons into subtasks normally performed as part of the tab's larger core task. The name of a group appears at the bottom of the group, such as the Font group on the Home tab.
Excel Glossary
hyperlink
Specially formatted text that anyone can click to jump to Web sites, move to other cells or workbooks, or create an e-mail message.
Excel Glossary
keyboard shortcuts
A combination of keys that you can press to execute certain commands, as opposed to finding and clicking the commands' buttons on the Ribbon or elsewhere.
Excel Glossary
Live Preview
A feature in Excel 2007 that enables you to point to thumbnails on a drop-down gallery to see how a new font, font size, table style, or cell style would look on your selected data before you actually apply it.
Excel Glossary
macro
A series of commands or actions in Excel that are recorded and saved together in a file. You can run the macro whenever you need to perform the task.
Excel Glossary
Name box
The left-most section of the Formula bar that displays the address or name of the current cell.
Excel Glossary
pivot table
A special type of table unique to Excel 2007 that enables you to summarize large amounts of data and pivot or rearrange the table's data to display different summaries of the information it contains.
Excel Glossary
Ribbon
A new feature of the Excel 2007 interface that replaces the menus and toolbars of previous versions; appears at the top of the Excel window, just below the title bar.
Excel Glossary
ScreenTip
A small window that displays descriptive text when you point to but don't click a command on the Ribbon or other objects in a worksheet.
Excel Glossary
sheet tabs
Small tabs near the bottom of a worksheet that you click to move between the worksheets in a workbook. You can assign descriptive names to sheet tabs.
Excel Glossary
slicers
New graphic objects in Excel 2010 that enable you to quickly filter the contents of a PivotTable on more than one field.
Excel Glossary
SmartArt
A type of graphic object in Excel 2007 that gives you the ability to quickly and easily construct graphical lists and diagrams in the worksheet.
Excel Glossary
sparklines
Tiny graphs (miniature charts) that fit within a single cell in the worksheet, used to show basic trends in data.
Excel Glossary
Status bar
A horizontal bar that appears at the bottom of the Excel 2007 window and keeps you informed of Excel's current mode. In addition, you can use the Status bar to select a new worksheet view and to zoom in and out on the worksheet.
Excel Glossary
tabs
The various "pages" of Excel 2007's Ribbon interface that you click to display command buttons relating to the tab's name, such as Page Layout and Formulas.
Excel Glossary
template
A pre-designed worksheet that can be used as a basis for creating new worksheets.
Excel Glossary
WordArt
Stylized text objects that you use to add pizzazz and emphasis to headings and other text in Excel 2007 worksheets.
Excel Glossary
workbook
The basic file type that you create when you use Excel 2007. A new workbook consists of three worksheets by default.
Excel Glossary
worksheet
The main document that you work in when you enter data into cells within Excel 2007. A worksheet is stored in a workbook file.
Excel Glossary
worksheet area
The portion of an Excel 2007 worksheet in which you enter cell data and add objects such as charts and graphics.
Excel Glossary
XPS XML Paper Specification
A file format developed by Microsoft that enables people to open and print documents in XPS Reader without access to the original programs with which the documents were created (such as Excel).
Excel Glossary
Zoom slider
An object on the Status bar in Excel 2007 that enables you to increase the magnification in a worksheet or shrink it down to get an overall picture of the worksheet data.
