In today’s Microsoft Excel tutorial, I’ll show you the differences between the Excel SEARCH vs FIND functions with real-world data and illustrations.

The Excel SEARCH and FIND functions help you locate the position of a substring in a text string. It returns the starting position of the substring as a number. The position number returned by SEARCH or FIND is useful in formulas that extract or manipulate text dynamically.

If you don’t know when to use SEARCH or FIND or are new to these useful Excel functions, keep reading. I’ll explain these functions in simple language and will also show you how differently these functions behave in Microsoft Excel. Let’s begin!

What Is the Excel SEARCH Function?

The SEARCH function in Excel helps you track down where a specific word or letter appears inside a bigger chunk of text. It doesn’t care about uppercase or lowercase, so apple and APPLE are the same to it. If it can’t find what you’re looking for, it throws an error—but you can use the IFERROR function to show an easily readable value or text instead of an error message.

Find below the general formula syntax for the SEARCH function:

SEARCH(find_text, within_text, [start_num]) 

Explanation of Arguments

• find_text: This is what you’re searching for, like a word, letter, or phrase.
• within_text: It’s the text where Excel will look for your search term.
• start_num: This tells Excel where to start looking; if you skip it, it starts from the beginning.

What Is the Excel FIND Function?

The FIND function in Excel helps you figure out where a specific word or letter appears inside a bigger chunk of text and gives you its starting position as a number. It reads the text from left to right and stops at the first match, so if your word appears more than once, you’ll only get the position of the first one.

If it doesn’t find what you’re looking for, it throws an error, which can be annoying—but you can catch that with an error-handling function to keep things smooth.

Here’s the syntax for the FIND function:

FIND(find_text, within_text, [start_num])

Explanation of Arguments

• find_text: It’s the specific text or character you’re searching for.
• within_text: The larger text where Excel will look for your search term.
• start_num: It’s the position where Excel should start searching; if omitted, it starts from the beginning.

Excel SEARCH vs FIND

Find below a quick comparison of the SEARCH and the FIND functions:

Similarities

Disimilarities

How to Use Excel SEARCH Function?

Imagine you have a list of email addresses. For that dataset of emails, you want to extract only the domain names, the part after @. Since domain names can have different lengths, you can’t just use a fixed position—this is where SEARCH steps in to help you.

Select the cell where you wish to extract the domain name and enter the following formula into it:

=RIGHT(A2, LEN(A2) - SEARCH("@", A2))

In the above formula, you only need to change the cell range reference to match your dataset. Also, in place of the @ character, you can enter any value that you wish to search in the text string.

Now, press Enter to calculate the cell.

Click on the fill handle and drag it down to replicate the formula in the rest of the cells.

That’s it! This is how you use the SEARCH function.

So this was an example of the simple SEARCH function. However, you can also use wild cards to further customize the substring searching in an Excel cell.

Suppose you’re managing a customer database and need to find customers whose names contain a certain pattern, like those with middle initials. Since middle initials can vary (e.g., John A. Smith, Emily B. Johnson), you can use the SEARCH function with the ? wildcard to identify them.

Suppose your dataset is something similar to the one shown above.

Select the first cell below the Has Middle Initial? column and enter the following formula into it:

=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(" ?. ", A2)), "Yes", "No")

In the formula shown above, change the cell range reference A2 with a cell that’s relevant to your data.

Press Enter to calculate the selected cell.

Now, use the fill handle of the first cell and drag it down to replicate the formula in the rest of the cells down the Has Middle Initial? column.

This is how you can use a wildcard in the SEARCH function.

How to Use Excel FIND Function?

Suppose you’re managing an international customer database. You need to extract the country code from phone numbers. Each number follows a format like +1-555-1234 or +44-208-5678. Here, the country code comes after the + sign and before the first hyphen.

Since FIND is case-sensitive and does not support wildcards, it’s perfect for locating specific, fixed characters like + and -.

Select the cell below the Country Code column and enter the following formula syntax into it:

=MID(A2, FIND("+", A2) + 1, FIND("-", A2) - FIND("+", A2) - 1)

Replace all the instances of the cell reference A2 with the cell that has a text string in your dataset.

Hit Enter to calculate the cell.

You can now use the fill handle to copy the same formula to the rest of the cells in the column.

That’s it! You’ve learned the easy steps to use the FIND function.

Conclusions

So far, you’ve found a detailed comparison between the SRACH and FIND functions in Excel. You’ve learned the descriptions of these functions, their arguments, a comparison table, and real-world scenarios where you can use the SEARCH and FIND functions.

If you have liked this Excel tutorial, write a comment to share your acknowledgment. If you have any suggestions or feedback, you can use the comment box.