Assuming that Column A contains your data, enter the following formula
in B1, and copy down:

=(LEN(A1)30)+0

The formula will return 0 for cells containing less than 30 characters,
and 1 for those containing more than 30 characters.

Hope this helps!

In article ,
sjs wrote:

I have thousands of rows in my spreadsheet and I need to identify the cells
that contain more than 30 characters. I know how to do a Validation on a
cell but that only flags me when I enter data into the formatted cell, not
when data already exists. Any ideas?

tks,
steve