Check whether a cell contains a substring

Question

Is there an in-built function to check if a cell contains a given character/substring?

It would mean you can apply textual functions like Left/R

Answer 1

This formula seems more intuitive to me:

=SUBSTITUTE(A1,"SomeText","") <> A1

this returns TRUE if "SomeText" is contained within A1.

The IsNumber/Search and IsError/Find formulas mentioned in the other answers certainly do work, but I always find myself needing to look at the help or experimenting in Excel too often with those ones.

Answer 2

Try using this:

=ISNUMBER(SEARCH("Some Text", A3))

This will return TRUE if cell A3 contains Some Text.

Answer 3

Here is the formula I'm using

=IF( ISNUMBER(FIND(".",A1)), LEN(A1) - FIND(".",A1), 0 )

Answer 4

It's an old question but I think it is still valid.

Since there is no CONTAINS function, why not declare it in VBA? The code below uses the VBA Instr function, which looks for a substring in a string. It returns 0 when the string is not found.

Public Function CONTAINS(TextString As String, SubString As String) As Integer
    CONTAINS = InStr(1, TextString, SubString)
End Function

Answer 5

For those who would like to do this using a single function inside the IF statement, I use

=IF(COUNTIF(A1,"*TEXT*"),TrueValue,FalseValue)

to see if the substring TEXT is in cell A1

[NOTE: TEXT needs to have asterisks around it]

Answer 6

The following formula determines if the text "CHECK" appears in cell C10. If it does not, the result is blank. If it does, the result is the work "CHECK".

=IF(ISERROR(FIND("CHECK",C10,1)),"","CHECK")