"Rick Rothstein" wrote:

Are you aware that Find (either from Excel's Edit/Find on the menu bar or
the VB function) will work with wild cards? Let's say you wanted to find
"some text" and that the text you are searching has this in one of your
cells...

This cell contains some //,,.:: text in it.

You can look for "some*text" and it will find the cell with the above text
in it. Now, of course, because it is a wild card search, it will also find
something like this...

This is some of the text in the file

If you are looking for the two words "some" and "text" next to each other
with nothing between them (except possibly punctuation marks), then, in
code, you can do something like this...

Dim FoundCell As Range
Set FoundCell = ActiveSheet.UsedRange.Find("some*text")
If Not FoundCell Is Nothing Then
If FoundCell.Value Like "*some*[A-Za-z0-9]*text*" Then
MsgBox """some text"" does not exist together"
Else
MsgBox "I found ""some text"""
End If
End If

You can, of course, expand this as necessary to find all cells and then do
whatever you are going to do with them (if you are doing this and need help
with it, explain what you need to do with the found cells).

--
Rick (MVP - Excel)


"Noob McKnownowt" wrote in
message ...
Hi once again people,

I am having problems getting a search feature to work in excel. At present
it just matchs the exact strings passed into it, i know about the 'option
compare text' statement so it recognises lower and uppercase letters.

The problem is this, the info being searched is dragged off a mainframe
and
then formated once imported to excel via a macro, this presents a problem
because large amounts of data are being moved at once it is very difficult
to
remove unwanted characters.

Is there a way to build in a feature to my cade that would ignore misc
characters such as,

spaces
.
,
/
\
;
:

If these can be ignored and just the text itself in each cell is searched
this would be a massive advantage, can anyone help???

PLEASE HELP ME!!

The Noob.



Hey guys,

thanks for thr responce, and i am sorry it has taken so long for me to get
back, but i havent been in work for the last couple of days. any way, the
problem i am having is this:

i work in a warehouse writting little pieces of VBA in excel that will allow
a quick format of data and some calculations so that a report can be compiled
and a summary of the info can be made.

in this instance my problem is this, every day a variable amount of data is
pulled off the companys mainframe, once this info is formatted (i have
already done this) the user needs to find a collection of data about a
particular product in any location in the warehouse quickly.

the user needs to be able to search through many, many products and have the
relevant info from all entries displayed, so if the data entry reads
"NON-STOCK ITEM . . " then i would like the info returned if they enter "non
stock item" or a variation of this. hope you understand what i am tryin to do
if not then please feel free to ask a question.

i was hoping the VB had some kind of function built in for this such as the
option compare text, but apparently not.

cheers.

The Noob.