As the name suggests, FIND function is used to find occurance of specific character/text in given (or target) text. On finding specified character/text excel displays position number of it.

We want to find occurance & position of word Brown in the sentence A Quick Brown Fox. So formulation of FIND for this would be as below

So it is clear from the table given below that the word Brown starts from 9^th position irrespective of it's length.

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1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17
A		Q	u	i	c	k		B	r	o	w	n		F	o	x

Let's say we want to find the position of 1^st space in the sentence An apple a day. So our FIND function formulation would be like this

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1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14
A	n		a	p	p	l	e		a		d	a	y

Continuing above example, now we want to find position of next occurrence of space i.e. 2^nd space in the sentence An apple a day. We would never succeed with the above given example as FIND function always fetch position of first occurrence. So 3^rd optional parameter start_position of FIND function is available for handling this type of scenario. This parameter specifies the position from which to start searching the character/text.

So formulation of FIND function for this scenario would be as given below:

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14
A	n		a	p	p	l	e		a		d	a	y

1. Search is case-sensitive
2. Even if multiple occurrences of character/text is found, still first occurrence is only displayed
3. Function displays #VALUE if character/text is not found