Excel's Formula - sisman

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Part II: Using Functions in Your Formulas
Finding and searching within a string
The Excel FIND and SEARCH functions enable you to locate the starting position of a particular
substring within a string:
FIND: Finds a substring within another text string and returns the starting position of the
substring. You can specify the character position at which to begin searching. Use this
function for case-sensitive text comparisons. Wildcard comparisons are not supported.
SEARCH: Finds a substring within another text string and returns the starting position of
the substring. You can specify the character position at which to begin searching. Use
this function for non–case-sensitive text or when you need to use wildcard characters.
The following formula uses the FIND function and returns 7, the position of the first m in the
string. Notice that this formula is case sensitive.
=FIND(“m”,”Big Mamma Thornton”,1)
The formula that follows, which uses the SEARCH function, returns 5, the position of the first m
(either uppercase or lowercase):
=SEARCH(“m”,”Big Mamma Thornton”,1)
You can use the following wildcard characters within the first argument for the SEARCH function:
Question mark (?): Matches any single character
Asterisk (*): Matches any sequence of characters
If you want to find an actual question mark or asterisk character, type a tilde (~) before
the question mark or asterisk.
The next formula examines the text in cell A1 and returns the position of the first three-character
sequence that has a hyphen in the middle of it. In other words, it looks for any character followed
by a hyphen and any other character. If cell A1 contains the text Part-A90, the formula returns 4.
=SEARCH(“?-?”,A1,1)
Searching and replacing within a string
You can use the REPLACE function in conjunction with the SEARCH function to create a new
string that replaces part of the original text string with another string. In effect, you use the
SEARCH function to find the starting location used by the REPLACE function.