Need Excel Function to FIND Text - Help!

[Cole]

Hello folks,

I run an online store with a huge selection of inventory. My inventory
is downloaded from my distributor into an excel csv file. I like to go
in a "pretty up" the entries to make it presentable to my shoppers. The
trick is that there is about 10,000 products with descriptions and the
works in this sheet.

What I'm wanting to be able to do is this. I want Excel to search a
column. Within this column are the descriptions of every product. I
want this search to find a particular word within these strings of
text. If the word is not found, then the result would be nothing. If
the word IS found, then I want Excel to do a vlookup on another column
to match that word and return a string of text which would be added to
the description.

Example:

I have 3000 knives within a spreadsheet. Within the descriptions of
these knives are the type of steel used in the knife. I want Excel to
find the name of the steel (i.e. "440C"). When and if found, I want it
to take that steel name and go to another section or sheet and do a
VLOOKUP (or whatever function is needed) and match that steel type.
Upon doing this, Excel would return the description of the steel which
is listed in this section or page and add it to the original
description of the knife.

Hopefully this makes sense. If anyone could help here, I would greatly
appreaciate it.

Cole

 

[Don Guillett]

To get you started, have a look in vba help index for FIND and FINDNEXT.
There is an example.

 

[Cole]

I worked with the FIND command quite a bit and could not get it to do
what I need it to do. It will find the number position of the text, but
them I don't know what to do with that. I need it to actually give me a
true or false response. If true, it would take that text and match it
to another section in the form of a VLOOKUP. The data it would retrieve
from that area would be pasted back to the original description.

This is confusing.

Cole

 

[Don Guillett]

You didn't post your code for comments. Perhaps you need more help than is
intended in the newsgroup.

 

[Harlan Grove]

Cole wrote...
....

What I'm wanting to be able to do is this. I want Excel to search a
column. Within this column are the descriptions of every product. I
want this search to find a particular word within these strings of
text. If the word is not found, then the result would be nothing. If
the word IS found, then I want Excel to do a vlookup on another column
to match that word and return a string of text which would be added to
the description.

....

There are much better tools than spreadsheets for this sort of thing,
but it could be done with a macro. Is there any pattern to your
substrings? Do they always appear inside parentheses or set off by
hyphens? If not, you're going to need to use regular expressions, and
the macro will be slow.