Well, I remember reading a post very similar to this some time ago, so
your searching wasn't very thorough.

Excel stores numbers in a special binary format defined by IEEE. Part
of the bit pattern is used to represent the mantissa (the binary
fractional part), and another part is used for the exponent (the power
of 2 that the number should be multiplied by). As such, you will not
be able to search for (decimal) numbers like 283.57, as they don't
exist in that format in the file (unless entered as text values).

Hope this helps.

Pete

On Nov 13, 8:57 pm, "Tim Childs" wrote:
Hi

I want to search for a numeric value (e.g. 283.57) in a large number of
Excel files stored in a directory.

While text seems to be stored as ASCII code and is visible in a file editor,
the numbers in Excel appear to be coded and certainly the XP file search
does not <do the business.

Are there any ways round this? (and, out of interest, can anyone tell me how
the numbers are stored?)

Many thanks

Tim

PS I have done some searches on the archive but not turned up anything
relevant/helpful.