4 ways to search for data in Google Sheets

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Google Sheets software has successfully replaced Microsoft Excel in many cases. Users can download spreadsheets and use them in MS Excel as an alternative to using the application, which can also open Excel files. If you’ve ever used MS Excel, you’re already familiar with the program’s search feature, which can be incredibly useful. Naturally, this widely available feature is also included in Google Sheets.

With the help of the web-based Google Sheets application, users can create, edit and share spreadsheets online in real time. Google’s product has features common to spreadsheets, such as the ability to add, delete, and sort rows and columns. However, unlike other spreadsheet applications, Google Sheets also allows multiple geographically dispersed users to work together on a spreadsheet at the same time and chat via an integrated instant messaging program.

Spreadsheets can be loaded immediately by users from their computers or mobile devices. Users can see other users’ changes as they are made, and the app automatically saves all changes. We mentioned below are the 4 ways to search data in Google Sheets????????

4 ways to search data in Google Sheets

Search using the Find option to highlight all matching cells in the worksheet

using search feature in Google Sheets, you can quickly identify cells that contain a certain string of text if you have cells containing text and want to do so. Remember this is a component of choice final of substitution that we will discuss in the following section. If you want to quickly search the entire worksheet and highlight cells that contain the matching string, choose this option. Suppose you have the dataset described below and you want to identify all cells that have the name “Tag”:

1. open the worksheet who has the data
2. Use keyboard shortcut Control + F (for Windows) and Cmd + F (for Mac). This will open a small Find box at the top right of the worksheet.
3. introduce the rope that you want to search across the entire worksheet

Use the arrows in the Find what field that point up and down if you want to go through each cell one at a time. You can also check the result visually because all matching cells are highlighted in green. You can use this quick method in the morning to see if any cells match your text string, then go through them one at a time. You can use the full-featured find and replace dialog functionality in Google Sheets if you need a little more flexibility when searching for data.

Search using find and replace

The dataset being displayed is very straightforward, so it’s clear that you can find what you need by simply looking at it. to make the tutorial simple and easy to understand, we kept it simple. Let’s say we want to find the cells that contain the name “Paul”. The steps you must follow to locate them are listed below:

1. click on the edit menu on the menu bar.
2. Select the ‘Find and replace’ option.
3. This will open the Find and replace dialog box. Alternatively, you can open this box directly by pressing CTRL+H (if on a PC) or Cmd+H (if on a Mac).
4. In the input box next to the label “Find”, type the word you want to search for (In our example, we can type the word “Paul”, since that is what we are looking for).
5. click in Find????????
6. This will select the first cell that contains the word.
7. If there are more instances of the word on the sheet, clicking Find each time selects the next cell containing the word????????
8. When you reach the last occurrence of the word, you will see a message that says “No further results found. going round” at the bottom of the dialog box.
9. If you press the Find button button after seeing this message, find and replace will return to the first occurrence of the word.
10. Once you are done searching (and/or replacing), press the ‘Done’ button button to close the Find and Replace dialog box.

Find and replace options

There are many more options available than just Find, Replace and Search if you look at the Find and Replace dialog. You can further narrow your search using each of these other options to get the results you want. Let’s look at some of these possibilities:

1. Case sensitive: Selecting this option allows your search to be case sensitive. So if you have a cell that contains a “Paul” (with lowercase ‘p’), the search will skip the cell.
2. Match all cell contents: Selecting this option allows you to search cells that exactly match your search word. For example, if this box is checked and your search word is “Paulo Rodriguez”, then the search only considers the cell that contains exactly the full name as a match. However, if the search word is just “Paul”, the search ignores the full name as it is not an exact match.
3. Search using regular expressions: This option is used if you have a regular expression in your “Find” field. A regular expression is a kind of string containing a specific pattern. If the contents of a cell matches the pattern, it is considered as a ‘match???????? Further explanation of Regular Expressions is beyond the scope of this tutorial, but if you want to know more about it, you can click on the ‘Help‘ link next to the option:
4. Also search in Formulas: In general, find and replace it only searches cell contents and formula results. If you also want to see if your search word is contained in the actual cell formula, you need to check this option.

Search using conditional formatting (to find and highlight cells with search string)

The approach described above finds cells that contain a search string and chooses them one at a time. Instead, you can use Google Sheets’ conditional formatting function to search and highlight all cells that contain your search term. To find all cells in the same dataset that contain the name “Paul”, follow these steps:

1. click on the format menu on the menu bar.
2. Select the ‘conditional formatting‘option.
3. This will open the ‘Conditional format rules‘ sidebar to the right of the window.
4. In the input box under “apply to range”, type the cell range you want to search or simply select the cell range. In our example, we can type A2:B11.
5. Selecting the cell range will open a dialog displaying the selected range. When finished, you can click OK???????? If you prefer to manually enter the range, skip this step.
6. Then, in the Format Rules section, under “format cells if”, click the drop-down arrow.
7. In the drop-down list that appears, select the option “The text contains“option.
8. You will see an input box below the dropdown. Enter your search word here. If you are looking for cells that contain the word “Paul”, type the word “Paul”
9. Under “formatting style”, click the fill color button ????????
10. Select the color you want to use, to highlight matching cells/rows???????? We select “yellow????????
11. Finally click on Done button to let conditional formatting do its job.

Final Words

Often, you can search rows of data in a spreadsheet to find a specific keyword. It’s simple to do this manually on smaller worksheets. Large spreadsheets make this almost impossible, however. Fortunately, Google Sheets comes with a ton of built-in features. features that simplify searching for data in your spreadsheets. We hope that our article on “4 Ways to Search Data in Google Sheets” will certainly help you to do that.