- Quick Start Guide
- Finding Characters in Excel with !SEMTools
- Search with Regular Expressions (Regex)
- What’s Next After Finding Characters?
The Find Characters menu in the !SEMTools add-in makes it easy to check if a cell contains certain characters — in just a couple of clicks.
Sure, it may seem like a small task to find a character or symbol in Excel. And yes, Excel has built-in tools to do this, including:
- Find and Replace: Works across your entire workbook, a single sheet, or a selected range.
- SEARCH and FIND: Show you the position of a character or text inside a cell.
- SUBSTITUTE: Can replace characters with blanks, which you can track using the LEN function.
- Filters: Hide rows that don’t contain the character(s) you’re looking for.
- MATCH (with wildcards): Helps find the location of a cell containing a certain symbol.
- VLOOKUP (with wildcards): Returns a matching value or a value next to it.
You can also read a related article: [How to Find Asterisks in Excel] — searching for special characters like “?” and “*” can be tricky.
However, standard Excel methods aren’t always the best solution — especially when you need to search for sets of characters rather than just one or two. The process becomes more complex and time-consuming.
That’s where !SEMTools comes in — offering fast and intuitive ways to find characters in Excel, including searching by character type, font style, or using regular expressions (regex).
Quick Start Guide
New to finding characters in Excel with !SEMTools? Here’s how to get started in 3 simple steps:
- Select your data range — Highlight the cells you want to search
- Open the Find Characters menu — Go to the !SEMTools tab and click “Find Characters”
- Choose your search type — Pick from character types, font styles, or use regex for advanced searches
Tip: Results are highlighted instantly, making it easy to spot exactly what you’re looking for!
Finding Characters in Excel with !SEMTools
The !SEMTools add-in organizes character search tools into two clear categories:
1. Find Characters by Type
This set of tools helps you identify if a cell contains:
- Text characters
- Numbers
- Latin characters
- Capital letters
Each search type is just a click away — no complex formulas required. Once you find what you’re looking for, check out what to do next.
Practical Examples & Use Cases:
Example 1: Find Numbers — Quickly identify cells containing numeric data mixed with text. Perfect for validating product codes like “ABC123” or finding order numbers in a list.
Example 2: Find Latin Characters — Spot non-English characters in international datasets. Great for ensuring data consistency when working with multilingual content.
Example 3: Find Text Characters — Isolate cells with text-only content. Useful for data cleaning tasks, such as finding comment fields in numerical spreadsheets.
2. Find Characters by Font Style
Need to locate text formatted in bold, italic, or underlined? No problem — these tools let you search based on formatting styles within cells.
Practical Examples & Use Cases:
Example 1: Find Bold Text — Quickly locate all emphasized headings or important notes in your spreadsheet. Ideal for identifying section headers or priority items that need review.
Example 2: Find Italic Text — Spot cells with secondary information or notes. Useful when reviewing documentation or tracking items that were marked for special attention.
Example 3: Find Underlined Text — Identify hyperlinks or emphasized data points. Great for quality checks or finding cells that may need format cleanup.
3. Find uppercase letters
Sometimes you need to check if cells contain uppercase letters — for example, to catch names written in all caps, or spot titles that need fixing. Manually scanning for this can take time, especially with large datasets.
Capital letters often signal headings, names, abbreviations, or even data entry errors. Being able to find and review them lets you ensure a consistent look in your spreadsheets — and spot patterns that matter. For example, you might use this tool to flag product codes, user IDs, or rows that were accidentally written in ALL CAPS.
With the Find Uppercase tool in the !SEMTools add-in, you can highlight all cells that include capital letters in just one click. It works whether the entire cell is in uppercase or only part of it — helping you quickly clean up inconsistent formatting.
Search with Regular Expressions (Regex)
By default, Excel doesn’t support regular expressions, but with !SEMTools, you can use them easily — no programming skills needed.
Regex lets you search for almost anything: patterns, symbols, combinations of characters, and more.
Best of all, the add-in includes built-in support for these functions:
- REGEXREPLACE
- REGEXTRACT
- REGEXMATCH
These work in both the free and full versions of the add-in.
Practical Examples & Use Cases:
Example 1: Find Email Addresses — Use regex pattern to locate all email addresses in your dataset. Perfect for extracting contact information or validating email formats.
Example 2: Find Phone Numbers — Match various phone number formats (with or without country codes, dashes, or parentheses). Great for standardizing contact lists.
Example 3: Find Specific Patterns — Search for custom patterns like postal codes, dates, or product IDs. Ideal for complex data validation tasks without writing complicated formulas.
What’s Next After Finding Characters?
Once you’ve found the symbols or characters you need, what do you want to do with them? These related tools might help:
- Remove characters (e.g. punctuation, numbers, or special symbols)
- Extract specific characters (from the beginning, end, or anywhere in the text)
- Replace characters (e.g. swap accented letters with plain Latin characters)
Explore these features under the following sections of the site:
- [Remove Unwanted Characters in Excel]
- [Extract Characters in Excel]
- [Replace Symbols in Excel]
Need more? !SEMTools offers dozens of other functions to make working with Excel easier, faster, and smarter.
This post is also available in RU.