Searching for the presence of specific words
 

I am creating an automatic college degree check worksheet. One tab has a list
of courses in each quarter and another tab has a list of required classes for
graduation. I would like to setup a formula that would find if "Organic
Chemistry B" is present in the classes tab and return a value that I could
use conditional formatting on.

I have tried using SEARCH and FIND, but I have not been sucessful. I
understand the conditional formatting part of the problem, but I do not
understand how to create a search function that will return some sort of
number.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

- Ryan

Searching for the presence of specific words
 

Use the ISERROR and MATCH. The following will return "found" or
"not found" depending whether 'organic chemistry b' is found in
cells A1:A10.

=IF(ISERROR(MATCH("organic chemistry b",A1:A10,0)),"not
found","found")


--
Cordially,
Chip Pearson
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Pearson Software Consulting, LLC
www.cpearson.com


"Ryan Ferrell" <Ryan wrote in
message
...
I am creating an automatic college degree check worksheet. One
tab has a list
of courses in each quarter and another tab has a list of
required classes for
graduation. I would like to setup a formula that would find if
"Organic
Chemistry B" is present in the classes tab and return a value
that I could
use conditional formatting on.

I have tried using SEARCH and FIND, but I have not been
sucessful. I
understand the conditional formatting part of the problem, but
I do not
understand how to create a search function that will return
some sort of
number.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

- Ryan