Thanks for your reply.

On Fri, 22 May 2009 17:52:56 +0100, Patrick Molloy wrote:

I've never seen that error. Find/Replace in XL 2003 works fine, so i'm not
sure what you expect from Microsoft..have you contacted them?

Don't know anyone to contact. My employer (the state) certainly won't pay
$35 (if it hasn't gone up since I last checked, years ago) for a support
call. Haven't searched the KB, if that's what you mean.

As far as your issue....have you tried to manually type the text into the
Find box rather that cut/paste?

Yes, tried that first. Started copying and pasting when I got the problem,
hoping it was something I was typing wrong. Besides, shouldn't be any
formatting since I copied from the entry line, not the cell.

"salgud" wrote in message
...
First time I did a slightly more complicated find and replace in XL 2003
this morning, and it won't work. Keeps telling me there's formatting in
the
find and replace and it can't do it. I'm copying a range description from
the entry bar into the find box, and it's either telling me that string
doesn't exist in the spreadsheet (that I copied from a cell in the
spreadsheet) or that there's formatting in the search criteria (which
there
isn't) and it can't do the search. The exact message in the second case
is,
'M$ Office Excel cannot find the data you are searching for, but has
detected that your search contains formatting symbols. Try changing the
search Options to "Look in"Values".'

I've tried it with several different selections, and am getting the same
result each time. Some of the search strings I've gotten this reply with
include:

$D$8:$D$5000
$D$8:$D$15000
=COUNTIF('Adolfo R'!$D$8:$D1000,1)

and other portions of this formula.

Has anyone else run across this problem? Anyone know a fix, or is Find and
Replace essentially gone until M$ decides to fix it?

Thanks in advance.