How to use the Excel Find command in VBA

[hershmab]

I want to be able to incorporate the Excel FIND command into a VBA subroutine so as to be able to find (but not replace) all instances of a user-specified text value in whatever area of a workbook that I select. The values in all cells of the workbook are text - words or phrases; what I am searching for are complete cell values. I then want to display all the matching cells and their addresses.

The obvious way to get started is to record a macro of running the Excel command. But I have tried to do this several times in different ways and always failed . When I go to edit the completely-recorded macro, I find that it has the expected headers and footers but no code!

Can anyone explain why this is and how it can be avoided/corrected? If it cannot, what is the basic VBA code for searching a range and returning all the matching values?

[tigeravatar]

hershmab,

One way...

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[HSV]

Or:

You can change de code with a inputbox.

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[Leith Ross]

Hello hershmab and tigeravatar,

The Message Dialog Box has a maximum character limit of 1024 characters. This may not be adequate to display all the results found in the workbook.

[tigeravatar]

Agreed, which is why my code shows each result 1 messagebox at a time. User didn't specify where/how to display the data, so I put that in there so hershmab could adjust it as needed.

[hershmab]

Many thanks to both TigerAvatar and HSV for useful parts to a solution and to Leith Ross for his very practical warning.

Using the Excel FIND command would quite possibly be a lot faster for large searches - my workbook has over 250,000 cells! It would avoid some of the looping.

So it would still be helpful if I knew why recording it in a macro was fruitless and if there is any way round that.

[hershmab]

This is my first venture into deep VBA programming so I need to ask for a bit more help with the Find method.

Searching VBA Help in Excel 2010, the only article I could find was headed "Find Method (VBA Add-In Object Model)". From the documentation this is very different from the Find method that both TigerAvatar and HSV employ:

1. It returns TRUE if the search value is found, not the found value(s) themselves
2. It has five arguments specifying the range to search and three optional arguments specifying how to search

Clearly this method is not what I need. But how and where can I find the specification of the Find method employed by your code?

[tigeravatar]

The Range.Find method:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff839746.aspx

Range.FindNext method:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff196143.aspx


Why I don't use Range.FindNext
http://www.excelforum.com/excel-prog...-findnext.html

[Leith Ross]

Hello hershmab,

This may help you understand it better. This is from the VBA Help files. If you have any questions are reading this, I will be happy to answer them.


Finds specific information in a range, and returns a Range object that represents the first cell where that information is found. Returns Nothing if no match is found. Doesn’t affect the selection or the active cell.

For information about using the Find worksheet function in Visual Basic, see Using Worksheet Functions in Visual Basic.

expression.Find(What, After, LookIn, LookAt, SearchOrder, SearchDirection, MatchCase, MatchByte, SearchFormat)
expression Required. An expression that returns a Range object.

What Required Variant. The data to search for. Can be a string or any Microsoft Excel data type.

After Optional Variant. The cell after which you want the search to begin. This corresponds to the position of the active cell when a search is done from the user interface. Note that After must be a single cell in the range. Remember that the search begins after this cell; the specified cell isn’t searched until the method wraps back around to this cell. If you don’t specify this argument, the search starts after the cell in the upper-left corner of the range.

LookIn Optional Variant. The type of information.

LookAt Optional Variant. Can be one of the following XlLookAt constants: xlWhole or xlPart.

SearchOrder Optional Variant. Can be one of the following XlSearchOrder constants: xlByRows or xlByColumns.

SearchDirection Optional XlSearchDirection. The search direction.

XlSearchDirection can be one of these XlSearchDirection constants.
xlNext default
xlPrevious

MatchCase Optional Variant. True to make the search case sensitive. The default value is False.

MatchByte Optional Variant. Used only if you’ve selected or installed double-byte language support. True to have double-byte characters match only double-byte characters. False to have double-byte characters match their single-byte equivalents.

SearchFormat Optional Variant. The search format.

Remarks
The settings for LookIn, LookAt, SearchOrder, and MatchByte are saved each time you use this method. If you don’t specify values for these arguments the next time you call the method, the saved values are used. Setting these arguments changes the settings in the Find dialog box, and changing the settings in the Find dialog box changes the saved values that are used if you omit the arguments. To avoid problems, set these arguments explicitly each time you use this method.

You can use the FindNext and FindPrevious methods to repeat the search.

When the search reaches the end of the specified search range, it wraps around to the beginning of the range. To stop a search when this wraparound occurs, save the address of the first found cell, and then test each successive found-cell address against this saved address.

To find cells that match more complicated patterns, use a For Each...Next statement with the Like operator. For example, the following code searches for all cells in the range A1:C5 that use a font whose name starts with the letters Cour. When Microsoft Excel finds a match, it changes the font to Times New Roman.

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Example
This example finds all cells in the range A1:A500 on worksheet one that contain the value 2 and changes it to 5.

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[hershmab]

Just what I needed, tigeravatar, thanks.