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Why it is More Difficult to Search in Excel than in Word

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The Excel application is meant to do more tasks than Word. For this reason, it follows why search in Excel is more difficult than doing it in Word. Check additional information about Search In Excel.

Excel, unlike Word, has sheets that you can work with simultaneously. These sheets can be found right at the bottom of the Excel window shown as tabs. And just by looking at its appearance, seeing the cells can definitely make you say that to search in Excel files should be a more complicated process than to search in Word files.

Doing a search within a Word document is easy. There are two ways to do the search in Word documents. First is by accessing the Edit menu then clicking on Find. And the other way is through its shortcut counterpart. Just hit the Ctrl key together with the F key in your keyboard and you will pull up a box with a space for you to type in the words you want to search. If your Word document has multiple pages, you can position your cursor where your document starts and do the search from there and it will search the document, from page one, all the way to your last page.

The Ctrl+F can still work in Excel; however, it is a little tricky. Excel documents do not have pages; they have sheets instead. If you simply press Ctrl+F, it will only do a search on the current sheet that you are on. You won't include the other sheets in the search that you want to do for the entire document. Although manually doing the search for each sheet is still possible, and it wouldn't be too tedious, especially if you only have few sheets to work on. However, there is an even easier way to do the search.

These are the steps that you can do to make things easier if you want to find certain words or strings in all the sheets of your Excel document:

First is to right click any sheet that you have in your Excel document. The right click will bring out a menu. And from the said menu, click "Select All Sheets". Clicking on "Select All Sheets" puts your Excel document into Group Mode. You will know that you are already in Group Mode through two signs Excel is showing. The first sign is by looking at the tabs. The tabs are now white and the current active tab that you are in will be bolded. The second sign is by looking at the title bar. You will see the word "Group" written on the title bar.

Once in group mode, the Ctrl+F function will now work on all sheets that you have in the Excel document. Searching through all your sheets can be done in two ways. One way is by keeping the Find box open and just hit "Next" to find words. The other way is by closing the Find box and pressing Shift then F4 to find the words you are looking for.

After the search in Excel, it is important to remember to ungroup your Excel. By not doing so, whenever you work in future, all the edits that you do on a single sheet will also happen in the rest of your sheets available in the document.

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