On Sat, 25 Aug 2007 06:26:01 -0700, Abdullah Kajee
wrote:

Text in cell A1 " the quick brown fox"
Text in cel A2 " June is here"
Text in cell A3 " Today is Monday" and so on until row A55000.
I have a spreadsheet with thousands of lines but some lines of text repeats
as above. How do I write one IF statement that searches for one of three
words such as "brown", "here" and "Monday" and then returns the keyword that
I am looking for. This way, I can quickly filter on all lines that have the
word Monday or the word June etc..I know I can use
=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(.......but help me to understand how to write 3 criteria
or more in one statement...right now I can only write one criteria ie
=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("JUNE",A2)),"JUNE"


You can nest up to seven IF's:

=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("JUNE",A2)),"JUNE",
IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("Brown",A2)),"Brown","not found"))

You can also use an array argument for the search term in your search
statement:

=CHOOSE(MATCH(TRUE,ISNUMBER(SEARCH({"Brown";"here" ;"Monday"},L1:L55000)),0),"Brown","Here","Monda y")

ARRAY-Entered with <ctrl<shift<enter will return the key word for the first
match.


But what if multiple key words are present? If in your 55000 lines, you might
have BROWN and HERE present.

You might want to investigate the Advanced Filter under the Data Menu.
--ron