It could get tripped up when situations like this might arise:

Looking for John:

Johnson = a match
John's = a match
Johnston = a match
Littlejohn = a match

Either formula will trip on these, David's or the one I offered.

One way to limit most of the problems is to pad the lookup value with a
space on each end. But even this will not work on these type of situations:

Looking for John:

"John"
John's
John?
John:
John!
John.

Biff

"SteveDB1" wrote in message
...
David.
Thank you.
It works like a charm.
Any items that I should be aware of as for not working? Or is that too
large
an answer...?
Again... Thank you!

"David Biddulph" wrote:

I can't see the message to which you are replying, Steve, but as far as
your
question is concerned, try
=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("stringname",A1)),B1*1/2,B$1*3/4) or
=IF(ISNUMBER(FIND("stringname",A1)),B1*1/2,B$1*3/4)

FIND() is case-sensitive, SEARCH() isn not.
--
David Biddulph

"SteveDB1" wrote in message
...
I want to do what seems to be a similar IF function.
Here is my version.
=IF(a1="*stringname*",b1*1/2,b1*3/4)
My goal is to look in a cell which contains a phrase. The phrase itself
varies {the cell contents could be a name of a person, with (word)
following
it}, but the particular component that I'm seeking either shows up as
(word),
or as (word1). Eg., cell contents being within the dbl quote marks:
"Dave
Johnson (word)", or "Danny Thomas (word1)"
Where "word" could be anything.
I've tried already, and it <always returns a false value-- b1*3/4.
1- can I do this?
2- what would I need to do in order to make it work?
I've also tried the tilda, and question mark. Neither of those are
working.
If however, I just have it look in a cell with a single character, the
equation works fine [=if(a1="c",b1*1/2,b1*3/4)]. I'd assume that it'd
work
well too if I had just a single word in the cell, as opposed to a
number
of
them. For some reason I just can't get it to work with longer elements,
where
I want to locate a single word within a string of 5 or six words.
If I'm unable to do this, what variation would I need to accomplish
this?
Thank you.