One more thing I failed to mention...the grid is essentially a calendar.
This spreadsheet is going to be used for attendance tracking...to log
absences, where a multi-day absence with a single cause is considered to be
the same as a single day absence.

"Rick Rothstein" wrote:

Clarification please... your subject line as well as your request indicates
that multiple cells can contain the text you are looking for... ignoring the
text "after" them, if C4 and B5 both contained this text, which of them
would be considered the "first occurance" as your subject line indicates you
are looking for? That is, are you looking row by row or column by column to
find the first occurance?

As for the "the next two cells, going across and then down" part of your
question, did you mean to look in the 3 cells that Ron's answer is based on,
or were you describing a 2x2 grid of cells?

--
Rick (MVP - Excel)


"Eric_in_EVV" wrote in message
...
I have a worksheet that is 7 columns by 5 rows...in any one of those cells
the user can input a certain text value, say "X". I need to find which
cell
that value is in and then test the next two cells, going across and then
down
to see if the same value exists in order to assign points based on a
predefined points system. Any ideas on how to do that ?