How to Use Efficiently the Search Function in Microsoft Excel?

Nowadays, spreadsheets applications are everywhere. They have been found extremely useful for accounting work where too many figures need to be handled accurately. When it comes to choosing software Microsoft Excel stands first. MS excel is being used widely in every region of the world.

Microsoft excel is easy to learn and convenient to use. Apart from this, it is equipped with numerous useful features. It presents effective tools for data analysis and storage.

An excel spreadsheet is very large and the data stored in a single sheet can be huge. Imagine the magnitude that a single Microsoft Excel file can reach. A file contains 16,777,216 million cells for the basic version. Further, each cell can have any value up to 32,767 characters in length. There is no limit to the number of worksheets that can be created in an excel file. The size of the excel sheet will be limited by the computer on which it is created.

With such enormous size, finding a particular data or the contents of a particular cell could have been quite difficult. Thankfully, there are multiple ways to find a data that that has been entered into an excel file. Without these features, it could be quite a pain to search for some particular data.

Fortunately, excel provides good search facility that makes things easier for you.

The one incredible command that MS Excel provides is the find and replace function. To use this command, go to the edit menu and click on Find. There is an image of binoculars made adjacent to this command. When the window opens, there are two tabs; one is just to find some text and the other is to both find and replace.

The find function provides lot of options to refine your search. It can be made more precise by checking the options available on the find dialog box.

Once the dialog box is opened, you will find a text box in which you enter the characters which you want to find. It can be any text- words or figures. There is a 'find all' button upon pressing which all cells that contain that particular text will be found.

Now the thing is you will get all the cells of which your given text is a part of. For example if you search for a number, say 12, you get all the numbers that contain the digit sequence 12.

At first, you will see the first place where the text you are looking for is found. You got to press the 'find next' button keep moving to the next occurrence of the text.

Next best thing about the Microsoft Excel search facility is that all the sheets present in the file can be searched. There are options to search by row, by column, formulae, values and even comments that are present in the cell.

There are many options and preferences available in MS Excel. Only if you take the time to learn the basics, using the spreadsheet package would be quite a delight.