Using Excel "IF" Statment To Filter Out Text Beginning Or Ending With A Certain Character

Question

Working on the same project as before and I need to find a way to to write an "IF" statement that will search for words beginning with a "<" as well as words that end with a " \ ". I would like to conditionally highlight those cells with the value "IGNORE: HIDDEN FIELD".

I searched around and found that there is a SEARCH function in Excel but that doesn't seem to be what I'm looking for.

Is anyone aware of how to do this? "If a cell begins with a "<" or ends with a " \ " then blah blah blah".

Answer 1

To match words that start with < and end with \, use

=IF(AND(LEFT(A1,1)="<",RIGHT(A1,1)="\"),TRUE,FALSE)

To match words that start with < and / or end with \, use

=IF(OR(LEFT(A1,1)="<",RIGHT(A1,1)="\"),TRUE,FALSE)

Cell A1 contains the word to test. This can form the basis of your conditional formatting test. If you want to display alternative text then replace TRUE and FALSE to suit personal taste, e.g. IGNORE: HIDDEN FIELD and A1 respectively.