Hi there,

I currently have a spreadsheet of several thousand records each of which is
categorised into five columns. What I'd like to do is to concatinate the
category columns into one field so that I have five values in one cell,
split up by a comma or semi-colon (ie "f;t;d;o;l;r"). I then want to search
on any instance of those categories

So here's the questions:

1) How should I write the string search to look for a particular letter (ie
"see if cell C3 contains the letter 'd' ")

2) Would this change if I was searching for a double letter combination (ie
'eg' for egg or, 'do' for dog)?

3) Is there a benefit to spliting up the field with a comma or a semi-colon
(or anything else come to that)?

4) Could I achieve this from AdvancedSearch or AutoFilter? (I want the
criteria to be selected from a Form that the user can change)

The main problem at the moment if the file size's negative effect on
performance (particularly whilst using the existing AutoFilter.

Thanks in advance

John