Forum Discussion
How do I Find/Replace or Filter with exact words/characters?
You may wrap it by spaces searching for " is ".
Hi SergeiBaklan - this does not work.
The reason is that for that feature to work the cell must contain nothing but the word "is".
For example, if I have a cell F1 with a value "My name is Matt" and I search for "is" and have "match cell contents" to true, then it will not find cell F1 because the cell contents contains words other than "is".
If the cell just contained "is" and nothing else then your solution would work.
Thanks for trying!
You may wrap it by spaces searching for " is ".
- I wasn't able to search for " is " in Excel 2016.
In fact, using the double quotes or even single quotes. the search didn't show any result.
Even using a space before and after " is ", or when I searched without a space "is".
Am I missing something or is it not possible in Excel 2016?It works in my Excel 2013 sheet if the search is done without double or single quotes.
- Hi There,
Thanks a lot for your response. I interpreted wrongly earlier.
I used the " or ' in the Find what box. My bad!!!!!
- Hi Sergei,
Thanks a lot for your response. I interpreted wrongly earlier.
I used the " or ' in the Find what box.
Thanks for attaching the screenshot, now it's crystal clear.
My query is that if I want to replace say all occurrences of "act" with "fact", the problem is that "active" will also be replaced and become "factive". Here, in this case, "act " / " act" / " act " won't do the trick.
SergeiBaklan Un-freaking believable!!
Thank you so much!!!
One small thing, for future reference: Is it possible to include punctuation e.g.
Find and replace "is" with "should be"
- visual = visual > Pass
- mistake = mistake > Pass
- is = should be > Pass
- is! = is! > Fail
is it possible to include punctuation instead of doing find and replace for is!, is., is, etc. ..........?
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For future readers:
- Microsoft Word has "match whole word only" Microsoft Excel does not
- Copying from Excel to Word using feature in point 1. then copying back to Excel does not work as smoothly and you'd think
- Using the Find/Substitute/RPT functions are not as simple as this!
Hi Matt,
Afraid not. You may use " is?" where the question mark means any single character. It finds " is ", " is!", etc., but the words as "issue" also will be found for substitution.
One option is to use Find Next and click Replace only if correct word was found.
Another option, if to replace in place, write some macro on VBA which will do the job.
One more option is to add helper column, if your texts are in column, and use formulas to change the text returning result into helper column.