Text Mastery: The Difference Between Excel's FIND and SEARCH Functions

A simple guide to locating any character or string within your data.

Welcome! When you're cleaning or manipulating text data in Excel (like email addresses, product codes, or names), you often need to know where a specific character or word begins. The **FIND** and **SEARCH** functions are designed to do exactly this: they return the starting position of a text string within another text string. While they perform the same core job, there is one crucial difference that dictates when you should use one over the other.

The Core Functions and Syntax

Both functions share the exact same syntax:

=FIND(find_text, within_text, [start_num])
=SEARCH(find_text, within_text, [start_num])
            

• `find_text`: The character or string you are looking for.
• `within_text`: The cell or text string containing the text you want to search.
• `start_num` (optional): The character position to start the search from (default is 1).

The result will be a number indicating the character position where the `find_text` begins, or a **`#VALUE!`** error if the text is not found.

The Critical Difference: Case Sensitivity and Wildcards

The deciding factor in choosing between these two is **case sensitivity**:

1. FIND is Case-Sensitive: It requires an exact match of the case (uppercase/lowercase). If you search for "script" but the text contains "Script," FIND will return a **`#VALUE!`** error.
2. SEARCH is NOT Case-Sensitive: It ignores the case of the letters. If you search for "script" and the text contains "Script," SEARCH will successfully return the starting position.

Additionally, **SEARCH** supports the use of **wildcard characters** (`?` for any single character, `*` for any sequence of characters), while **FIND** does not.

Example:

Cell A1 contains: "DataInsights"

=FIND("data", A1)  --> #VALUE! (Because 'd' is lowercase)
=SEARCH("data", A1) --> 1 (It ignores case and finds the text starting at position 1)
=SEARCH("Data*", A1) --> 1 (Wildcard finds the text)
            

In most real-world data cleaning scenarios where you can't guarantee uniform casing (like in user-entered email addresses), **SEARCH** is the safer, more robust choice. Use **FIND** only when you need to enforce a specific case match.

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