Introduction

FIND, FINDB in excel is a text/string function. This function finds one text string within another string and returns its position as a number. This is a case sensitive function. For example, if we have a text string in cell A4 and we wants to find the position of ‘P’ in this string, then we use the function =FIND(“P”,A4) and gets result in form of a number, if the text is not present, #VALUE error is displayed.

Syntax

=FIND(Find_Text, Within_Text, Start_Num)

=FINDB(Find_Text, Within_Text, Start_Num)

Arguments

• Find_Text:  Text which will be found.
• Within_Text: The text string carrying the text whose position has to be found.
• Start_Num: It defines the character from where search will be started. Default value is 1.

Keynotes

• These functions may not support all languages.
• FIND function is used with SBCS (Single Byte Character Set) and FINDB with DBCS (Double Byte Character Set).
• FIND usually calculates all characters as 1 while FINDB calculated double byte characters as 2.
• These functions are case sensitive.
• These functions do not allow wildcards.
•  Start_Num is used to skip some characters if desired.
• For wildcards containing characters, use SEARCH function.

Examples

In this example, some products are given in column A and position of certain characters from these text strings is found using FIND and FINDB function: