Dave,

I am a novice on excel, so i am having trouble following your example. Could
i send you the spreadsheet and ask you to put your slution on the sheet? the
e-mail on your profile is not working. mine is

"Dave Peterson" wrote:

Maybe you could apply data|filter|autofilter and use a custom filter.

Contains and your keyword

Or if you have just a few keywords, you could put them in row 1 (the header row)
and then use a formula like:

Say your keyword column is Column A.

You could put the first key in X1 (say "KeyWord1")

Then in X2:
=isnumber(search(x$1,$a2))
And this formula down drag down as far as your data goes.

Then you'll see TRUE or FALSE depending if KeyWord1 appears in A2

Add more headers to the right (y1, z1, ...)
and drag down the formulas to the right.

Then you could these columns to filter or sort your data.



paul b wrote:

I am trying to look through 1column in a large spread sheet for certain key
words. i would like to group the rows of the sheet using these key words. the
column i am searching has many words in it, not just the key word.

currently, we use a find that highlights the field with a specific color if
it contains the key word. We then create a blank column next to this searched
column Using visual inspection based on the color, we populate this new
column with a number that allows us to sort the entire sheet, therfore
grouping the rows by key word.

does anyone have a faster way? the visual inspection and population of the
adjoining column is time consuming. find a replace does not work, because the
fields ion the search column contain many words, so only the key word gets
replaced.

--

Dave Peterson