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hbeer444's avatar
hbeer444
Copper Contributor
Aug 15, 2025
Solved

Function Error

=SEARCH(".","a…a")   gives me an error whereas the correct answer should be 2 Its in one excel cell
  • pradejain's avatar
    Aug 19, 2025

    hbeer444​ 

    second argument in the formula "a…a" doesn’t actually contain a period (.) — it contains a horizontal ellipsis character (…, Unicode U+2026). Visually, it looks similar to three dots, but Excel treats it as a completely different character, so SEARCH(".", "a…a") can’t find a match and returns an error.

    You can try 

    =SEARCH("…","a…a") , this will return 2.

    or 

    =SEARCH(".", SUBSTITUTE(A1, "…", "."))

     

    Please mark as resolved if this answers your question. 

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