Find and Replace in Excel allows you to quickly search all cells and formulas in a spreadsheet for all instances that match your search criteria. This guide will cover how to search in Excel and use find and replace in Excel.
Examples of what you might use the Excel Find function to search for:
All cells that contain the number “10”
All formulas that contain a reference to cell “B7”
All formulas with the SUM function
There are two ways to access the Excel Find function:
Press Ctrl + F
On the Home ribbon under “Find and Select” choose “Find”
There are many good reasons to use the Find function when performing financial modeling in Excel.
The main reason is to use it in conjunction with the Replace function, to quickly edit many cells and/or formulas at once.
For example, if you have hundreds of cells with formulas that link to a specific cell, you may want to use find and replace to change the formula. This will save you the pain of individually editing each cell with that formula, and guarantee that you don’t miss any.