How to Search for Text or Numbers in Excel 2003 When You Do Not Know the Full Spelling or Number

In an Excel spreadsheet, you may need to search for words, like a person’s last name, or numbers, like a phone number, but you do not recall the full spelling or number. Excel’s find feature includes an ability to use wildcards in the search process to help you locate data.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Microsoft Excel 2003

1. Open the Excel file you want to search.
2. Edit/Find Menu Press the CTRL and F keys at the same time or go to Edit in the top menu bar and click on Find to bring up the Find and Replace dialogue box.
3. Wildcard Example On the Find and Replace dialogue box, enter the part of the name or number you know. For instance, for Rumpelstiltskin, maybe you remember it started with “Rum” but can not recall how the rest of the name was spelled. On the “Find what” portion of the dialogue box, you could enter rum*; it’s not case sensitive. The * (asterisk is on the 8 key) is a wildcard that will search for any number of characters. Then click on Find Next (or Find All depending on your search result expectations.) Be sure to see tip below.

Tips & Warnings

• In addition to the asterisk wildcard that searches for any number of characters, through the Find feature, you can also use a question mark (?) if you only need to find any single character. For example, if you are looking for a date that you know is in the 1980’s, you could enter 198? in the “Find what” portion of the dialogue box. That will search for any date between 1980 and 1989.