What it Does: The FIND() function in excel locates the position of a string inside of a cell. When searching for text strings, this function IS CASE SENSITIVE.
Arguments: FIND(VALUE,CELL,[Start Num])
- VALUE – The value you want to search for, whether Text (case sensitive), Boolean, or Number.
- CELL – The cell you’re searching in
- [Start Number] – Optional – If you’d like to start a certain part of the string, enter a value here.
Example:
How many characters into the string “google.com” does the letter “c” appear.
The result of the function is 8, so we know that the letter c is the 8th character within the string. But what if the string was capitalized?
Here we have the same function, but we get a #VALUE error as a result. Since the FIND() function is case sensitive, it’s looking for a lower case c, which it does not find.
Example 2: Where is the letter “c” in the string “I love cheese”?
The point I wanted to show here is that spaces are counted as characters too. There’s only 5 letters before the “c”, but 7 total characters including the spaces.