Harlan -

Thank you. To make it functionally equivalent (case-insensitive) I made
it

....SUBSTITUTE(LOWER(range),LOWER(ref),"")...

Works like a champ. Considering that this is a sliding range looking
for all matches by keying on the last match, I'd almost say it looks
like I know what I'm doing. Except for one thing. Why don't I have to
wrap the second range as

....<LOWER(range)... too?

By inattention I didn't and now I don't understand why I didn't have to.
One-to-many arrays make my hair hurt. ;-)

Thanks again.
....best, Hash


In article ,
"Harlan Grove" wrote:

wrote...
I was doing wildcard matches [MATCH("*"&ref&"*",range,0)]and
happened to notice that it skipped an obvious correct match.
After attacking that for too long a time, I found that
MATCH() won't handle strings longer than 255 characters.
...

OK. Since really just checking if the value of ref appears in
any cell in range, try the array formula

=MATCH(TRUE,SUBSTITUTE(range,ref,"")<range,0)

which does work for arbitrarily long strings.