How do I search for special characters in a cell using Google Sheets?

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Google Sheets is a powerful spreadsheet software that allows users to store, organize, and analyze data. One useful feature in Google Sheets is the ability to search for special characters within a cell. This feature is particularly helpful when working with large datasets that may contain various symbols or non-alphanumeric characters. To use this feature, simply select the cell or cells you wish to search, then use the “Find and replace” function to search for specific characters. This will save time and effort when trying to locate specific data within a sheet.

Google Sheets: Search for Special Characters in Cell

You can use the following formula to check if a given cell in Google Sheets contains any special characters anywhere in the cell:

=SUMPRODUCT(--ISNUMBER(SEARCH({"!","#","$","%","(",")","^","@","[","]","{","}"},A2)))>0

This particular formula checks if cell A2 contains any special characters and returns TRUE if it does.

Otherwise, it returns FALSE.

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

Example: Search for Special Characters in Cell in Google Sheets

Suppose we have the following list of phrases in Google Sheets:

Suppose we would like to search each phrase in column A to determine if it contains a special character or not.

To do so, we can type the following formula into cell B2:

=SUMPRODUCT(--ISNUMBER(SEARCH({"!","#","$","%","(",")","^","@","[","]","{","}"},A2)))>0

We can then click and drag this formula down to each remaining cell in column B:

Google Sheets search for special character

The formula returns TRUE if the phrase contains a special character.

Otherwise, it returns FALSE if no special characters are found.

Note that the formula we used contains the most common special characters but if there are other special characters you’d like to search for, simply include those within the SEARCH() function in the formula.

Also note that you can choose to only search for specific special characters if you’d like.

=SUMPRODUCT(--ISNUMBER(SEARCH({"$","%"},A2)))>0

This formula would return TRUE if a dollar sign ($) or percent sign (%) were detected in a given cell or FALSE if neither character was detected.

Additional Resources

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

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