How to Build Search Box in Excel

In this step-by-step overview, learn how to add an advanced search box to your Excel workbook. You can insert a search box with no knowledge of VBA or coding. Imagine you have a cookie customer list, and you want to find the chocolate chip cookies, you can insert a search box to find that. We'll run through how to make the search box return exact matches and more advanced scenarios like partial match search, multiple column match and highlighting the search term using conditional formatting in the results. This is a fully fledged search box. To follow along, you can access the spreadsheet in the description below.

👋 Additional resources

⌚ Timestamps
0:00 Introduction
0:47 Enable developer tab
1:36 Add basic exact match search box
4:23 Add partial match search box
8:11 Add multiple column search box
9:32 Use conditional formatting to highlight partial matches
10:25 Wrap up

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[danemmerich]

Being Self Taught as well, i have to watch this Video many times to really get it where it sticks. You are the man Kevin! So smart!

[Jojosmith]

Great teacher ! Thank you very much Kevin for your hard work and all the data sample which saves us a lot of time to prepare. I love your lessons, very helpful, easy to understand with your clear voice and well prepared tutorials.

[katrinahernandez]

As an easy way to reference a larger number of columns select the area you need and use the create from selection option under formulas. Use the top row option to name them in bulk and tweak the reference to include the first row. Thanks for the tutorial!

[thomask]

Your solution is great. Another top-video. Thanx Kevin.
I would change the file type from xlsm (with macros) to xlsx as it doesn't contain any program code. If you don't use an active-X-control, you may use it in OneDrive or SharePoint in the Browser as well.
As questioned in a comment below to check, if the search-text is at the beginning I would check the value in the search-Column I. If this is a numer and it is 1, then the searched text is at the beginning. You can do this for example in column K with the function IF in which you check the search-Result and the Number-Status.
For example:
=IF(J5#, IF(I5#=1, 1, 0), 0)
Include this in the FILTER-Function.
Hope this helps
Tom

[Ke-D]

Wow, u not only make it sound easy, you make it look easy too. Thanks for the video. This is the perfect thing I was looking for. Actually, I got more than I wanted. Instant subscribe.

[tomt]

Thanks for the great tutorials. They are answering a lot of questions for me. Keep up the great videos.

[abhijitd]

Thanks Kevin. It's very useful video. I came across this right time when I am looking for keyword analysis related formulas in excel. It's not completely address my requirement but quite useful to carryout my work.

[pakhong]

Thanks so much Kevin, your tutorial is fantastic !

[naeemoxychem]

Hey Kevin! Its really great from you. Actually i have inspired by your demonstrations and i have started working on so that i can make community habituated with such productive tips.

[masaudamin]

What a brilliant explaination!! thank you Kevin!! you are doing an amazing job.

[stephenfulmer]

This makes everything so much easier on the excel side for chemical engineering thank you!

[VERTICALcube]

Hi Kevin, first of all I wanna thank you for sharing such immense information with all of us. I just want to know if you have similar formulas that excel previous versions can do with all of these formulas, like excel 2010 or 2016? We still have these versions with our dozens of employees from afar. And this is really useful if they can have excel with similar formula in their older versions of excel.

[samuelwilliams]

Omg this was racking my brain for ages! The initial basic serch worked fine but the stsps after that werent! I went over and over then though "ill just keep following and see what happens" by the finzl step, it all worked!!! Over the moon!!!!

[firmaevents]

I watched it with excitment since i wait for your valuable videos. You are one of the best excel teachers. I recenlty subescribed with office 365 and iam enjoying its powerful features. Thank you alot

[pk-solution]

Thank you so much, Kevin, for your helpful search box tweak.

[DerickPitcher]

I've been looking for this for so long. Thank you so much Kevin!

[mohammadamini]

Wow, that was a great Tutorial.
Thank you very much for the very useful videos. ❤️

[DanBrill]

Fantastic. This is going to make for a very easy way for my users to search a table. Thanks!

[paulajimenez]

Your videos are so good I come back again after some months!! Thank you!

[JustBlankNoInfo]

I never knew this was possible. This is great! This is a top-notch tutorial, loved it!