Skip to content
Free Excel Tutorials
  • Home
  • Excel For Beginners
  • Excel Intermediate
  • Advanced Excel For Experts

Data Analysis

  • Working With Tables in Excel
  • Managing Conditional Formatting Rules in Excel
  • Conditional Formatting Icon Sets Examples in Excel
  • How to Create Thermometer Chart in Excel
  • How To Perform and Interpret Regression Analysis in Excel

References

  • How to use Excel LOOKUP Function
  • Vlookup Examples in Excel
  • How to get address of named range in Excel
  • How to use Excel FORMULATEXT function
  • Find Closest Match in Excel Using INDEX, MATCH, ABS and MIN functions

Data Validations

  • Excel Data validation no punctuation
  • Excel Data validation date in next 30 days
  • Excel Data validation specific characters only
  • Excel Data validation require unique number
  • Excel Data validation unique values only

If cell contains in Excel

by

This tutorial shows how to calculate If cell contains in Excel using the example below;

If you want to copy cells that contain certain text, you can use a formula that uses the IF function together with the SEARCH and ISNUMBER functions.

Formula

=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("abc",A1)),A1,"")

Explanation

Once you find a value you’re looking for you can copy it to another location, or display a message, or perform some other calculation.

Too complicated? Just need a formula for If cell equals?

If cell contains “abc”, copy it elsewhere

In the example shown, we have a list of email addresses, and we want to copy those that contain “abc”. In  C5, the formula were using is this:

=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("abc",B5)),B5,"")

In this formula, the logical test is this bit:

ISNUMBER(SEARCH("abc",B5))

This will return TRUE if the the value in B5 contains “abc” and false if not. See the cell contains specific text formula for a full explanation.

To copy cell B5 if TRUE, we just need to supply B5 again for the “value if true” argument. If false, we supply an empty string (“”) which will display as a blank cell on the worksheet.

Post navigation

Previous Post:

COSH function: Description, Usage, Syntax, Examples and Explanation

Next Post:

Excel Data validation require unique number

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Learn Basic Excel

Ribbon
Workbook
Worksheets
Format Cells
Find & Select
Sort & Filter
Templates
Print
Share
Protect
Keyboard Shortcuts

Categories

  • Charts
  • Data Analysis
  • Data Validation
  • Excel Functions
    • Cube Functions
    • Database Functions
    • Date and Time Functions
    • Engineering Functions
    • Financial Functions
    • Information Functions
    • Logical Functions
    • Lookup and Reference Functions
    • Math and Trig Functions
    • Statistical Functions
    • Text Functions
    • Web Functions
  • Excel VBA
  • Excel Video Tutorials
  • Formatting
  • Grouping
  • Others

Logical Functions

  • Nested IF function example in Excel
  • IF with boolean logic in Excel
  • IFNA function: Description, Usage, Syntax, Examples and Explanation
  • How to use Excel XOR Function
  • IFERROR function: Description, Usage, Syntax, Examples and Explanation

Date Time

  • Convert Excel time to decimal hours in Excel
  • Add days to date in Excel
  • Get days between dates in Excel
  • Get work hours between dates and times in Excel
  • Convert date to month and year in Excel

Grouping

  • If cell contains one of many things in Excel
  • Group times into 3 hour buckets in Excel
  • Running count group by n size in Excel
  • Calculate conditional mode with criteria in Excel
  • Group arbitrary text values in Excel

General

  • How to get original number from percent change in Excel
  • Currency vs Accounting Format in Excel
  • Split Cell Content Using Text to Columns in Excel
  • Spell Check in Excel
  • Excel Default Templates
© 2026 xlsoffice . All Right Reserved. | Teal Smiles | Abbreviations And Their Meaning