Excel Exact Word Matching

Question

Let\'s say I have \"Vegas is great\" in cell A1. I want to write a formula that looks for the exact word, \"gas\" in cells. Vegas ≠ gas, but the only search formula I\'m finding

Answer 1

I think the only way to cover all possible punctuation surrounding the search word is to create a custom macro function. Use the enhanced split function to tokenize the sentence into an array of words then search the array for a match.

Enhanced split function https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa155763

How to create custom macro http://www.wikihow.com/Create-a-User-Defined-Function-in-Microsoft-Excel

Code to create FindEngWord function

Public Function FindEngWord(ByVal TextToSearch As String, ByVal WordToFind As String) As Boolean

Dim WrdArray() As String
Dim text_string As String
Dim isFound As Boolean

isFound = False

text_string = TextToSearch

WrdArray() = Split(text_string)

isFound = False
For i = 0 To UBound(WrdArray)
    If LCase(WrdArray(i)) = LCase(WordToFind) Then
        isFound = True
    End If
Next i

FindEngWord = isFound

End Function


Public Function Split(ByVal InputText As String, _
         Optional ByVal Delimiter As String) As Variant

' This function splits the sentence in InputText into
' words and returns a string array of the words. Each
' element of the array contains one word.

    ' This constant contains punctuation and characters
    ' that should be filtered from the input string.
    Const CHARS = ".!?,;:""'()[]{}"
    Dim strReplacedText As String
    Dim intIndex As Integer

    ' Replace tab characters with space characters.
    strReplacedText = Trim(Replace(InputText, _
         vbTab, " "))

    ' Filter all specified characters from the string.
    For intIndex = 1 To Len(CHARS)
        strReplacedText = Trim(Replace(strReplacedText, _
            Mid(CHARS, intIndex, 1), " "))
    Next intIndex

    ' Loop until all consecutive space characters are
    ' replaced by a single space character.
    Do While InStr(strReplacedText, "  ")
        strReplacedText = Replace(strReplacedText, _
            "  ", " ")
    Loop

    ' Split the sentence into an array of words and return
    ' the array. If a delimiter is specified, use it.
    'MsgBox "String:" & strReplacedText
    If Len(Delimiter) = 0 Then
        Split = VBA.Split(strReplacedText)
    Else
        Split = VBA.Split(strReplacedText, Delimiter)
    End If
End Function

Can be called from your excel sheet with this.

=FindEngWord(A1,"gas")