Search advice appreciated

  • Thread starter Thread starter Paul Beaty
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Paul Beaty

I'd be most grateful for somec advice on Excel 2003 & a search facility. I
have an excel file with some 40,000 rows of phrases in column A - 1- 40,000.
When searching phrases with a keyword and using 'find' I can click through
phrase after phrase okay, locating those phrases with the keyword in them.
The question is - Is there a facility within Excel that allows me to search
for phrases with multiple keywords within them, and not just single
keywords. By multiple keywords I mean keywords that do not run
consecutively i.e. searching for a phrase with 'good & day' within them
which is as such - 'It has been a good long day.'

Many thanks for any advice

Paul Beaty
 
Hi, Paul. You might try the AutoFilter. You can use Custom, and put two
criteria in as Contains. Other than that, you might be looking at coding a
search loop: find all that have your first word and hide the rest, then
search for the second word and hide those that don't have it - rinse and
repeat until done.

HTH
Ed
 
Even though you have an answer, if you have multiple phrases to look for, you
could use a helper column and put a formula like:

=countif(a1,"*this is phrase 1*")+countif(a1,"*another phrase here*")+....

Then filter on that that column for anything bigger than 0.

You could even stack them in another formula easier to use if the number of
phrases gets large:

=SUMPRODUCT(COUNTIF(A1,{"*this is phrase 1*","*another phrase here*"}))
 
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