# Excel's search feature not working



## adanedhel728

I'm continually being frustrated with Excel (2003) because the search feature is erratic. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. There are many, many times that it will say "Microsoft Office Excel cannot find the data you're searching for," even though it's there. 

"Match case" and "Match entire cell contents" are both unchecked. Sometimes switching to "Search by columns" works and sometimes it doesn't. 

Is there any way to fix this?


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## DKTaber

It's not a case of "fix this"; it's just that the Find function in Excel is finicky. I run into the same problem due to formatting I employ in most of my worksheets. For example, a worksheet that displays "19.00" in one or more cells *will not be found* if you actually entered only "19" in the cell, set the cell to display "19.00" and try to search on "19.00". The Find function finds only *what you actually entered*.

Given this advice, does it now work?


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## adanedhel728

Well, actually, no, because the cells I'm searching are formatted as text :\


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## DKTaber

Could it be that you inadvertently selected a series of cells before doing the search? If you do that, it will search only in the selected cells; will ignore all others. If that's not the case, I'm at a loss to figure out why the search function doesn't find the entry(ies).


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## adanedhel728

No, actually, I made sure to avoid that.


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## DKTaber

Although this is highly unlikely to be the cause, I have from time to time had worksheets where a cell was formatted for numbers and clearly had a number in it, but the formulas at the bottom of the column the cell was in did not recognize that the number was there, either for math or counting. That is, a column with 10, 20, 20, 30 and 30 in five cells would add up to 90, not 110, and the count of the # of items would be 4, not 5. The only way I could find out which cell was unrecognized was to enter the numbers again until I got to the one that caused the total and count to correct. I never found out why this happens, and never tried doing a Find on such columns to see if it would find the number that was not recognized. . . but I'll wager that if I did, it would not find it. 

The chances of your problem being related to this is <0.1%, but thought I'd mention it anyway. As I said before, I am at the moment out of ideas as to the cause.


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## adanedhel728

Yeah, that's not it, either. Thanks for your help anyway, though, I do appreciate it.

I discovered that if I happen to be in the sheet where the data is, it works fine (in other words, the "search entire workbook" option doesn't work), but the problem with that is that the spreadsheets I'm using are oftentimes well over a hundred sheets large. And I discovered that closing out the document and reopening it usually fixes the problem temporarily. It's a frustrating workaround, though.

It also just occurred to me that I might be able to import the whole thing into Word and search that way. I'm going to try that when I go to work on Monday.


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## slurpee55

Is your search set to look for values or formulas? If you want to find a text line and it is set to formulas, it won't work for you - no such formula will exist.


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## DKTaber

slurpee55 said:


> Is your search set to look for values or formulas? If you want to find a text line and it is set to formulas, it won't work for you - no such formula will exist.


It would be strange indeed if that's the answer. Perhaps it's different in Excel 2003, but my "Find" (Excel 2000), whether set to Values or Formulas, finds anything I ask it to, and it makes no difference whether the cell entry is a number or text, or what the cell format is.


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