Excel: What is the way to use 'if function' with asterisk? I want to return 'true' for all those cells, which contains letter 'b' anywhere in it. I used the formula =if (a1="*b*","true") however it is not working.

Asked by Last Modified  

Follow 4
Answer

Please enter your answer

Professional Excel teacher and seminar conductor with 4 years experience

No you cannot use asterisk in this fashion in excel because anything you give inside " " is printed in exactly the same manner. Here if u want to search b in a particular cell you have to use search or find function. It will return error if it doesn't find b . Both find and search are exactly similar...
read more
No you cannot use asterisk in this fashion in excel because anything you give inside " " is printed in exactly the same manner. Here if u want to search b in a particular cell you have to use search or find function. It will return error if it doesn't find b . Both find and search are exactly similar except find is case sensitive and search is not case sensitive. =search("b",cell_ref,1) =find("b",cell_ref,1) In case u don't want the functions to return error if they don't find the required input, use iferror, iserror or iserr read less
Comments

Real life excel

Use =if(iserr(search( "b" ,a1,1)),"False","True"). What happens here is , that it search for "b" in the cell, and answers true or false
Comments

Related Lessons

Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook is the preferred email client used to access Microsoft Exchange Server email. Not only does Microsoft Outlook provide access to Exchange Server email, but it also includes contact, calendaring...

Conditional formatting with formulas
Conditional formatting quickly formats information in a spreadsheet. But sometimes the biult in rules are not enough. Adding your own formula to a conditional formatting rule gives it a power to help you do custom things.

Data Consolidation In Excel
Before you begin consolidating the data, make sure that there is consistency across the data sources. This means that the data is arranged as follows: Each range of data is on a separate worksheet. Each...

Printing Worksheets In Excel
i. Quick Print: If you want to print a copy of a worksheet with no layout adjustment, use the Quick Print option. There are two ways in which we can use this option. Choose File » Print (which...

Flash Fill: Advance Excel
Flash Fill is only available in MS excel 13 and above versions. Flash fill is used to fill the data automatically in the below cells if a pattern is evident. It can also extract, insert or concatenate. Some...

Recommended Articles

Applications engineering is a hot trend in the current IT market.  An applications engineer is responsible for designing and application of technology products relating to various aspects of computing. To accomplish this, he/she has to work collaboratively with the company’s manufacturing, marketing, sales, and customer...

Read full article >

Software Development has been one of the most popular career trends since years. The reason behind this is the fact that software are being used almost everywhere today.  In all of our lives, from the morning’s alarm clock to the coffee maker, car, mobile phone, computer, ATM and in almost everything we use in our daily...

Read full article >

Whether it was the Internet Era of 90s or the Big Data Era of today, Information Technology (IT) has given birth to several lucrative career options for many. Though there will not be a “significant" increase in demand for IT professionals in 2014 as compared to 2013, a “steady” demand for IT professionals is rest assured...

Read full article >

Business Process outsourcing (BPO) services can be considered as a kind of outsourcing which involves subletting of specific functions associated with any business to a third party service provider. BPO is usually administered as a cost-saving procedure for functions which an organization needs but does not rely upon to...

Read full article >

Looking for MS Office Software Training ?

Learn from the Best Tutors on UrbanPro

Are you a Tutor or Training Institute?

Join UrbanPro Today to find students near you