You said you could have 30 columns that may contain the characters "bob".

I guessed that those 30 columns were columns A:AD.

So you could put this in AE2
=countif(a2:ad2,"*bob*")0

=countif(a2:ad2,"*bob*")
will count the number of cells in A2:AD2 that contain "bob".

=countif(a2:ad2,"*bob*")0
will return true or false depending on if that count is 0 or greater than 0.

Then drag this formula down that column (AE) and filter by that column.

wrote:

Sorry Dave, I'm an Excel novice. I don't understand how to use that
formula or where to put it.

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Dave Peterson