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ThePoopycorn's avatar
ThePoopycorn
Copper Contributor
Feb 03, 2023

NOVICE USER - How to find a cell using multiple search terms?

I'm a designer in my workplace and given that the server has files all over, I would find myself on wild goose chases looking for files that people forgot/don't know where they could be. I ended up creating an Excel Index spreadsheet with 2 columns. 

 

Column A: Complete Folder Path

Column B: File Name

 

This has worked over all pretty good finding many documents/files but sometimes I'm stumped with more generic file names and the FIND tool can only matches of what I search.

 

I was wondering if there was a semi beginner-friendly process to be able to find a cell using 2 terms. Like Finding cells that have the terms "Stickers" and "3x" but they don't necessarily have to be next to each other

 

EXAMPLE:

1) I search for the term "Sticker" or "Stickers" and get 696 Search results

2) I search "3x Stickers" or "Stickers 3x" and get no results, but I wanted to search if there were cells with both terms, even if they are not a single string, just cell that have both terms. Something how in Explorer, you can search for "Stickers 3x" and it will give you every file that has both terms (i.e Client Name_Stickers 300x250mm_3x kinds_PRESS).

 

I could use Explorer, but given the files being in a server, a search could take up to 5+ minutes which is not time efficient at all.

 

This would also help to look for other usual suspects like "Filename" and ".PDF" or other file types as usually they have Document specs in the title

 

I have read about =SEARCH, =MATCH, and =INDEX but quickly reading some pages online I couldn't figure out how to make it work for my situation as all the examples were Tables with Terms and numbers and I don't have any numbers. The Spreadsheet currently over 470,000 rows.

 

Thanks!

1 Reply

  • ThePoopycorn 

    =ISNUMBER(SEARCH("3x",A2))*ISNUMBER(SEARCH("Sticker",A2))

    Maybe with this formula which is in cell B2 in the example. It returns "1" if both search terms are found in the cell.

    =SUMPRODUCT((ISNUMBER(SEARCH("3x",A2:A8))*ISNUMBER(SEARCH("Sticker",A2:A8))))

    This formula is in cell C2 in the example and it returns the count of cells that contain "3x" and "Sticker".

     

    If you have Excel 2019 or later you can apply the FILTER function to filter the cells that contain "3x" and "Sticker".

    =FILTER(A2:A8,(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("3x",A2:A8)))*(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("Sticker",A2:A8))))

     

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