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.
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.
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.
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.
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.