Does Excel contain a function that checks if a cell contains text? No. Should it? Absolutely. Like we've done before, with other functions that don't exist (IFNOTERROR, ISNOTERROR) we're going to create the Excel Contains function ourselves. It's not that hard!

Excel CONTAINS function

So we want a formula that returns TRUE if a cell contains a specific text, and FALSE if it doesn't.

For example, we may have a list of names with Mr (for Mister) and Ms (for Miss) in front of the name.

To determine the gender, we could check if the text "Mr" is used in a cell to determine if the person is male. Like this:

Name	Contains "Mr"
Mr. James Gordon	TRUE
Ms. Anna Young	FALSE
Ms. Annie Hensley	FALSE
Mr. Tyler Patel	TRUE

Alright, so how do we make this function? Well if you just want the answer, you can click the "Show answer" button in the top-right of the exercise below.

But if you want to try it for yourself, here's a hint: you need to combine two functions. One of them is called SEARCH, which works like this:

=SEARCH(Find text, Within text)

It returns the index at which the text is found. If you need more hints, you can keep reading below the exercise.