You can use the following formula in Google Sheets to check if a cell contains text from a list:

=ArrayFormula(IF(LEN(A2:A13), REGEXMATCH(A2:A13,".*(?i)("&TEXTJOIN("|",
TRUE,$E$2:$E$4)&").*") ,""))

In this example, if cell A1 contains any of the text values in the range E2:E8 then it will return TRUE, otherwise it will return FALSE.

The following example shows how to use this formula in practice.

Example: Check if Cell Contains Text from List in Google Sheets

Suppose we have the following dataset in Google Sheets that shows the number of points scored by various basketball players:

There are three teams in the list from Texas: Mavs, Spurs, and Rockets.

Suppose we’d like to create a new column that tells us whether each team is from Texas or not.

First, we’ll create a list of the Texas teams in column E:

Then we’ll use the following formula to check if the value in the Team column contains any of the text values in column E:

=ArrayFormula(IF(LEN(A2:A13), REGEXMATCH(A2:A13,".*(?i)("&TEXTJOIN("|",
TRUE,$E$2:$E$4)&").*") ,""))

We can type this formula into cell C2 and then copy and paste it down to the remaining cells in column C:

Notice that any row that contains Mavs, Spurs, or Rockets receives a value of TRUE while all other rows receive a value of FALSE.

For example:

• The first row received a value of TRUE since “Mavs” is in the list.
• The second row received a value of FALSE since “Nets” is not in the list.
• The third row received a value of TRUE since “Mavs” is in the list.
• The fourth row received a value of FALSE since “Lakers” is not in the list.

And so on.

The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Google Sheets: