"italiavb" wrote in message
...
So, if the value I'm looking for is text, why doesn't ISTEXT work in place
of ISNUMBER ?

Because FIND returns a number!

Both FIND and SEARCH return the starting position (character number) of a
substring within a string.

ISTEXT and ISNUMBER have nothing to do with the data type of the search
value. You're testing the returned value of the FIND/SEARCH function.

If the substring is found its position is passed to ISNUMBER which then
evaluates to TRUE. If the substring is not found then FIND returns #VALUE!
then ISNUMBER evaluates to FALSE. So, using ISTEXT in this manner will
always evaluate to FALSE.

Biff