Find & Select in MS Excel
There’s a button in MS Excel that is so important, the people at Microsoft decided it deserved to go on the “Home” tab. Yet, until today, I never really paid any attention at all to it. It sits way off on the right rather inconspicuously, but today I realized that this button is a powerful tool that makes it much easier to navigate, update, and search any Excel worksheet.
The “Find & Select” button should not have evaded my attention for so long. Whether you want to know what cell values are hard coded versus which are calculated using formulas, you need to find hidden data validation criteria that someone else set up without leaving nice little comments to warn you, or you simply want to search for a given element, the “Find & Select” button does it all.
So why didn’t anyone tell me about this in the past? For one, the icon on the “Find & Select” button is completely non-intuitive. It’s supposed to be a pair of binoculars but it looks like a Lego castle. Additionally, some of the basic functions like “Find” and “Replace” are habitual keyboard shortcuts I’ve been using for years (Ctrl + F and Ctrl + H respectively) so I never needed to find the icon that brought up those options. Finally, it’s probably because Microsoft has had a long history of putting the crap that no one needs or wants all the way to the right, so I generally keep my vision away from that side of any office applications.
In any case, the “Find & Select” button will be a nice weapon for me to use against people who like to construct non-intuitive worksheets.
