I'm trying to do a search for multiple strings in a cell with an OR-condition in Excel 2016.
E.g. I have a string abcd1234 and I want to find ab OR 12.
I'm using the german version where the function SEARCH is called SUCHEN and it should behave the same way.
I found this answer which suggests this solution:
SEARCH({"Gingrich","Obama","Romney"},C1).
I also found this website which suggests the same syntax:
SEARCH({"red","blue","green"},B5)
Same with this website:
SEARCH({"mt","msa","county","unemployment","|nsa|"},[#Tags])
So they basically say make a list of search terms separated by commas enclosed by curly braces and you're good.
But putting these into Excel 2016 just results in the usual meaningless Excel error message which says there was an error with the formula and it's always highlighting the whole part in curly braces.
Taking the first example the only way I could get Excel to not throw its error message was to change the syntax like this:
=SEARCH({"Gingrich";"Obama";"Romney"};C1)
But separating the search terms with semicolons doesn't apply the OR-condition correctly, so this is not the solution.
I'm aware from this answer that I could make separate searches and string them together with a condition, but I would like to avoid that, and I also want to know why the syntax that is supposed to work as confirmed by multiple sources is not working for me.
EDIT:
Okay, I'm starting to understand this, thanks to Solar Mike:
The code =IF(COUNT(SEARCH({"Romney","Obama","Gingrich"},A1)),1,"") works indeed perfectly fine.
Also =COUNT(SEARCH({"Romney","Obama","Gingrich"},A1)) works.
But =SEARCH({"Romney","Obama","Gingrich"},A1) does not.
Also =ISNUMBER(SEARCH({"Gingrich","Obama","Romney"},A1)) does not work.
I'd love to know the reason why.
Ok, so this works:
OR(IFERROR(FIND("ab",A1,1),0),IFERROR(FIND("12",A1,1),0))
tested here :
I followed one of the links and the version like this:
=IF(COUNT(SEARCH({"Romney","Obama","Gingrich"},C1)),1,"")
worked as expected for me, but if the search is isolated it then fails and I have not found an explanation ...
Like other array-style formulas, the part that delivers the array has to be enclosed in some sort of aggregate function to make it scan through the array - otherwise it only looks at the first element of the array. So anything like COUNT, SUM, SUMPRODUCT will do the trick.
My preferred one is
=OR(ISNUMBER(SEARCH({"a","b","c"},A1)))
because you can easily change it to this if you want AND logic:
=AND(ISNUMBER(SEARCH({"a","b","c"},A1)))
Related
I'm building a monitoring system that takes a log (where people register their work in a set format) and returns a counter, which I can use for analysis. The monitor and log are two separate workbooks. The log has entries like this: INITALS;DATE;HOUR:RESULT|
Each cell can contain multiple entries.
My first attempt was to do a simple countif and look for a string (note that I use ; instead of , in formulas since I work on a Dutch excel):
=COUNTIF('LOCATION'!Table[LOG];"*NB;??/??/????;??:??:#A*|*")
This worked fine, but the formula only counted the number of cells where this string was present, not the actual number of occurences. I then tried this solution.
=SUM(LEN('LOCATION'!Tabel13[LOG])-LEN(SUBSTITUTE('LOCATION'!Tabel13[LOG];"NB";"")))
This indeed counted the number of times "NB" was present in the LOG. However, when I tried to use the original search string, this solution stopped working:
=SUM(LEN('LOCATION'!Tabel13[LOG])-LEN(SUBSTITUTE('LOCATION'!Tabel13[LOG];"*NB;??/??/????;??:??:#A*|*";"")))
It seems to me that SUM does not recognize symbols like ? or * which are necessary to define the correct search string. Where did I go wrong? Or can this be solved in another way? I can still look into VBA, but the workbooks are slow as hell already.
"?" and "*" are wildcards. Some functions support these (like COUNTIFS()) where others don't. Like you found out, SUBSTITUTE() does not.
Here is one way to count, assuming ms365:
Formula in C1:
=REDUCE(0,A1:A2,LAMBDA(a,b,a+LET(X,SEQUENCE(LEN(b)),SUM(--(IFERROR(SEARCH("NB;??/??/????;??:??:#A*|*",b,X),0)=X)))))
Note: I removed the asterisk in front of "NB" just to make searching for a position valid in comparison to what i called variable "X".
So I quite often find myself doing tasks on Excel which involve evaluating a text string as an array. Generally speaking I just use this:
Function EVAL(Ref As String)
EVAL = Evaluate(Ref)
End Function
So the formula will be, for example:
=EVAL("{"&CHAR(34)&SUBSTITUTE(TEXTJOIN(";",TRUE,MID(Index[Industries],2,LEN(Index[Industries])-2)),";",CHAR(34)&";"&CHAR(34))&CHAR(34)&"}")
The cells in this example will have contents like:
;Automotive;Rail;Energy;
;Automotive;Rail;
;Energy;
;Automotive;Aerospace;
(As it happens this is the precise problem I'm stuck on right now, though it has come up in different ways in the past.)
This has worked for me in the past, but I've been running into difficulties lately.
I have come to the conclusion it isn't working because application.evaluate, it turns out, has a character limit of 255. I've seen examples of VBA tricks to bypass this for text strings that are formulas rather than arrays, but copy-pasting those they don't seem to work for when I'm using it to interpret a text string as an array rather than as a formula.
Is there some trick to get this to work? (Or, indeed, is there some alternative method to achieve this altogether?)
Right, as per my comments, if you are using ms365, you could avoid your workbook to be xlsm just because you need to split values into an array. Make use of what is available with native functions, for example:
Formula in C2:
=TEXTSPLIT(CONCAT(A1:A4),,";",1)
Formula in D2:
=FILTERXML("<t><s>"&SUBSTITUTE(CONCAT(A1:A4),";","</s><s>")&"</s></t>","//s[node()]")
Note 1: As per time of writing you'd need to enable the BETA-channel to gain access to TEXTSPLIT(), and if I recall correctly your version (2203) is allowed to start using this function. Just google how to get access and update your Excel.
Both options can obviously be nested inside the UNIQUE() function.
Note 2: If at any point CONCAT()'s limits are reached (32767 characters, thanks #ScottCraner), maybe you can avoid using that with help of the lambda's helper function REDUCE():
=TEXTSPLIT(REDUCE("",A1:A4,LAMBDA(a,b,a&b)),,";",1)
Note 3: In case you can't update your Excel just yet, and you wonder how to use FILTERXML(), don't mind me refering you to another post I wrote a while back here.
first-time poster so please bear with me. I am trying to convince Excel to do a substring and failing miserably. The task is simple enough on the surface of it, extract text that's between a fixed set of chars (+, -, * and /), basically mathematical operators.
My input string looks like this:
A+B+C+D
Now, if my string looks like that, or like A-B-C-D, all is good, I can use this and it works (not my code, found on https://exceljet.net/formula/split-text-with-delimiter and modified to suit my needs:
First text: TRIM(MID(SUBSTITUTE($A2,"+",REPT(" ",LEN($A2))),0*LEN($A2)+1,LEN($A2)))
Second: TRIM(MID(SUBSTITUTE($A2,"+",REPT(" ",LEN($A2))),1*LEN($A2)+1,LEN($A2)))
Third: TRIM(MID(SUBSTITUTE($A2,"+",REPT(" ",LEN($A2))),2*LEN($A2)+1,LEN($A2)))
Forth: TRIM(MID(SUBSTITUTE($A2,"+",REPT(" ",LEN($A2))),3*LEN($A2)+1,LEN($A2)))
And all is good, until I have a string like: A-B+C-D or wahtever combo, basically not all the same char.
I tried using Find and Search in different configurations, but I always come to the same problem:
Using substitute gives me the n'th occurance and that's no good as - may be my second symbol or third
Can't dynamically and accurately calculate the length for MID, as it does Nr. of chars, not "until"
I can't use VB script for security reasons, so I am stuck trying to use Excel formulas.
It HAS to be one formula, as in the end, it's part of a bigger formula that's something like this:
CONCATENATE(IF(ISNUMBER(A),A,VLOOKUP(A)),IF(ISNUMBER(A),A,VLOOKUP(A)),IF(ISNUMBER(A),A,VLOOKUP(A)),IF(ISNUMBER(A),A,VLOOKUP(A)))
So I have the input in a cell and my result has to do all the processing in an adjacent cell.
Thank you in advance, at whit's end over here.
You can try FILTERXML() function.
=TRANSPOSE(FILTERXML("<t><s>"&SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"+","|"),"-","|"),"*","|"),"/","|"),"|","</s><s>")&"</s></t>","//s"))
If you are not on Excel365 then try below formula.
=FILTERXML("<t><s>"&SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE($A1,"+","|"),"-","|"),"*","|"),"/","|"),"|","</s><s>")&"</s></t>","//s[" & COLUMN(A1) &"]")
To learn FILTERXML() go through this article from #JvdV
For lower versions of Excel following formula would work by copying across as much as needed:
=TRIM(MID(SUBSTITUTE(" "&SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE($A1,"+"," "),"-"," "),"/"," "),"*"," ")," ",REPT(" ",99)),99*COLUMNS($A1:A1),99))
which is fairly similar to what has been posted on Exceljet site.
I got a RDLC-Report and I need to add the exponential formating to some numbers, so basically this is how it should look like.
I tried Text^2, searched in the expression-menu and even tried to copying the text from Word, but I still couldn't get it to work.
So, how does this work?
EDIT:
I found out about the <sup> HTML-tag, however when I try using them, they just get ignored.
Found out that I can just copy-paste the Unicode-version instead of any tags or functions.
Please note, that I only need the numbers 1 - 3 and they can be easily found in the unicode table.
https://unicode-table.com/en/#control-character
I'm trying to get this into excel: e^(-(2.2/9.58)^2)
According to my graphical calculator AND wolfram alpha this should give: 0.9486
However when I type it in excel with the following formula: =EXP(-(2.2/9.58)^2) I get 1.054
I've tried multiple different things but I still can't get the right answer out of it. What am I doing wrong with the formula in Excel??
Excel seems to mess up the brackets and does some distribution on its own. Very odd.
=EXP(-((2,2/9,58)^2)) should work
By way of some explanation, in Excel (as conventional) the negation operator has precedence over exponentiation. So:
=EXP(-(2.2/9.58)^2)
is treated just as:
=EXP((-2.2/9.58)^2)
or
=EXP(0.052737)
would be, hence resulting in 1.05415. Whereas:
=EXP(-0.052737)
is 0.948629.