These tools help with finding patterns or symbols in cells and cell ranges. Like most of procedures in SEMTools, these operate with selected list of cells.
How to use
Select a list of cells and press button responsible for the process you wish to execute. The result is always TRUE or FALSE. This is useful in cases when you need to perform a quick research of selection and further actions are not yet needed.
Finding approach is also useful because you have only 2 options to choose from.
TRUE and FALSE, then you can filter and count, choosing between these 2 options. Fast and easy.
Use cases
Imagine you already know that all cells must contain some pattern. Or one of several patterns. Or it must contain all of them.
Checking with find pattern functions, you can find anomalies in your data. Quick filter by TRUE or FALSE will help you see those mistakes all at once and understand what to do next.
Fast-pivoting TRUE-FALSE results
Before taking decisions on what to do with data, it might be useful to count how cells that match or don’t match your criteria, are distributed.
To do this, you can create a pivot table.
Objects to find with !SEMTools find tools
6 types of objects can be found with !SEMTools — submenus are created for each:
- Find characters — check if cells contain specific characters
- Find words — check if they contain words you want
- Find phrases — for searching given phrases or toponyms in a given list
- Find cells — these routines use conditions that apply to full cell content.
- Find duplicates — as these ones are very popular and stand a little bit out of the croud. See the description to find out more on this.
- Find worksheets — this simple macro initializes a useful interactive list of spreadsheets in the active workbook. Useful when there’s too many sheets for the worksheet tab and it becomes difficult to navigate. Actually helps to find sheets!