How to search in Google Sheets

In this post, we’re going to look at how we can search in Google Sheets for specific text, numbers, formulae, and links.

Search in Google Sheets

Here we have a list of customers and we want to find any called “pott”.

Press Ctrl + F and the search box will appear.

Type in the search term and it will tell you if there are any matches and if there are how many there are.

The cells which contain the search term are highlighted on the sheet.

You can step through each of the cells by clicking on the little arrows.

Note, this only searches the sheet you have open.

Find and replace

You can also open the main Find and Replace dialogue box from here by clicking on the 3 dots.

Here you can enter a more specific search and replace your search term with other text.

From here, you can also search all the sheets in the spreadsheet, the current open sheet, or a specific range.

To replace a particular search term, enter your text in the “Replace with” box.

To replace all the text in all the cells that match your search term, just click “Replace all”. If you want to replace certain ones, you can step through them one by one, by clicking “Find”, which will find the next term matching your search term, and highlight on the sheet. If you want to replace it, click “Replace”, or click “Find” again to move on to the next cell.

You can also access the “Find and Replace” dialogue box by going to the “Edit” menu and selecting “Find and Replace” or using the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl + h (Cmd+Shift+h: Mac).

By default, searching isn’t case specific, so “pott” will match with “POTT”, “Pott”, etc. You can make it match the case by clicking “Match case”.

It’s not just text you can search for but you can also search for figures, looking for specific ones and possibly identifying them to replace them as we saw above.

Advanced searches

You can also search for the whole cell content, search within formulae and links. You can also use regular expressions to search.

Personally, I love using Ctrl+F to quickly find something on a sheet. Try it out!

Check out more Google Sheets tips here.

Plus, I have a series of YouTube shorts with lots of quick Google Sheets tips here.