This tutorial explains the basics of how you can find the characters position in LibreOffice Calc.
While processing data, it is often required to find a particular position of a character in a string. And you may want to repeat the search in multiple cells as well. LibreOffice Calc provides two functions, SEARCH and FIND – which you can use to find character position.
Table of Contents
Find Characters Position in LibreOffice Calc
The basic idea of both the function is to give input your character and target where it should be searched.
Search Function
Syntax
SEARCH (text to be found, text where search to be made, starting character position)
Note: Search function is not case-sensitive.
Example
=SEARCH("m",C5,1)
This example searches the character “m” in the text present in C5 cell. And search starts from position 1. And it returns the value 11 which is the position of “m”. Search function is not case-sensitive. Hence, if you mention “M” also, it should return 11. For case-sensitive search, use the FIND function below.
Find Function
Find function is same as SEARCH function above. Only difference is it case-sensitive.
Syntax
FIND (text to be found, text where search to be made, starting character position)
Example
=FIND("m",C5,1)
In the same example above, you can see the result is the same as below in FIND function. It returns 11 which is the position of the character “m” in the text.
But, as it is case-sensitive, if you change the formula to capital m i.e. “M” – the result is #VALUE error (no result). Because it is case-sensitive.
Closing Notes
I hope these examples helps you find characters position in LibreOffice Calc cell. Remember, you can also use a string search – not only a single character here. And the basic difference between the two function is their case-sensitiveness.
