greetings, i have fairly simple problem that i can't figure out. have single
cell which has text, and a column of zero, one, or up to twenty text entries
which i want to compare to the single cell and tell me if there's a match.
however, in the column, would like to be able to make entry with a wildcard,
e.g., Yes *, or Yes ??% so that if the single cell had Yes 10% or Yes 15%
would return a match. any help greatly appreciated!

I'm not clear on how you want this to be displayed, but if you'd like
to have a flag that shows if a word is in a cell you can test with
FIND:
=IF(ISERROR(FIND("Yes",E4)),"","Match")

Note that Yes we can, The Eyes of Laura Mars, and Yesterday would all
generate the Match condition.

You can limit it to the first 3 characters only:
=IF(ISERROR(FIND("Yes",LEFT(E4,3))),"","Match")

If you're worried about the Yesterday issue you can include a space
(or comma, etc):
=IF(ISERROR(FIND("Yes ",LEFT(E5,4))),"","Match")


On Jun 9, 2:51 pm, mwam423 wrote:
greetings, i have fairly simple problem that i can't figure out. have single
cell which has text, and a column of zero, one, or up to twenty text entries
which i want to compare to the single cell and tell me if there's a match.
however, in the column, would like to be able to make entry with a wildcard,
e.g., Yes *, or Yes ??% so that if the single cell had Yes 10% or Yes 15%
would return a match. any help greatly appreciated!

Hi,
By using the FIND function, you won't need wildcards because it searches the
text for any occurrence of the desired text.

If your words are in Column A, starting A3, and your word to find is in A1,
enter this into B3 and copy down.

=IF(ISNUMBER(FIND($A$1,A3)),"Bing!","")

Regards - Dave.

hi dave and reitanos, this addresses the Yes and some percent issue but
ignores the other text entries which could be in the column. say my column
has these entries: N, P, Y 10%, and Y*. my single cell, which changes, might
be N, then Y, then O, then Y 50%, then P. and my formula should return: true
or 1, 1, 0, 1,1.

would like a formula which can test for all entries (as many as twenty) in
the column as value in single cell changes. hope that's more clear.