Search code examples
excelsearchtextexcel-formulacontain

Search cell for substring and return true of false


I have a column(G) with text paragraphs in the cells. I would like to place a true or false in Column(J) if Column G contains the word "Outage", non case sensitive.

Total novice here, I tried this in J51, knowing that in G51 the word "outage" exists:

=ISNUMBER(SEARCH(G51,"Outage",text))

But it always returns False. I know I'm screwing up syntax but I can't find an example that fits my needs, and other examples don't seem to specify a cell to actually search, so I guessed at this.


Solution

  • Your order is wrong The order is (Substring,String,Start)

    the third criterion in search is a start location and is optional, but when used it is looking for a number and not text. This is throwing an error based on that and thus returning false.

    https://support.office.com/en-us/article/search-searchb-functions-9ab04538-0e55-4719-a72e-b6f54513b495

    =ISNUMBER(SEARCH("Outage",G51))