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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.

find function

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?

find function

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”?

find function

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.