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Adding a Little Animation to Your Life
Converting a Range of URLs to Hyperlinks
Making the Formula Bar Persistent
You can use the conditional formatting feature in Excel to help draw attention to cells that contain specific text in which you are interested. For instance, if you have a range of cells and you want to know which ones contain the letters "shawn," then you can do the following in versions of Excel prior to Excel 2007:
=NOT(ISERR(SEARCH("Shaw",A1)))
If you are using Excel 2007 then you should follow these steps, instead:
=NOT(ISERR(SEARCH("Shaw",A1)))
You can make this approach even more general-purpose in nature by specifying a cell that contains what you want to search for. For instance, if you type "Shaw" in cell F7, then you could replace the formula in step 4 or step 5 with the following:
=NOT(ISERR(SEARCH($F$7,A1)))
Now, you can search for something different just by changing the characters in cell F7.
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2671) applies to Microsoft Excel versions: 97 2000 2002 2003 2007
A Picture is Worth Thousands! Your worksheets are not limited to holding numbers and text. You can also add graphics or easily create charts based on your data. Excel Graphics and Charts, available in two versions, helps you make your graphics and charts their absolute best.