Generic Formula =ContainsSpecialCharacters(string) If it does not find any special characters it will return FALSE. The below formula will return TRUE if any cell contains any characters other than 1 to 0 and A to Z (in both cases). So how do we do this in Excel? How can we know if a string contains any special characters? Well, we can use UDF to do so. We can find the special characters that are on the keyboard by manually typing but you can't know if there are symbols in the string or not.įinding any special characters can be very important for data cleaning purposes. So if you want to know if a string contains any special characters, you will not find any Excel formula or function to do so. Wingdings is a pretty good choice, since it's standard on Windows machines and Macs that have Microsoft Office installed.We know that TRIM and CLEAN Excel functions are used to clean up unprintable characters and extra spaces from strings but they don't help much in identifying strings containing any special character like or ! etc.

Keep in mind that other users will only see special characters in fonts that they, too, have installed on their system. Let's switch to Wingdings to find a checkmark and a checkbox symbol. If you need to insert a graphic symbol from a certain font, select the font first, then browse the available symbols. You can also double-click to insert a symbol. When you find the symbol you want, just click Insert. For example, use the Subset menu to switch to arrows. Here, you can select both a Font and a Subset of symbols. If the character you need is listed here, select it and click Insert. The Special Characters tab is a rather short list of commonly used characters. This launches the Symbol window which contains two tabs. The more standard way to add special characters is to use the Symbol button on the Insert tab of the ribbon. This means that we can add a copyright symbol by typing a lowercase 'c' in parentheses and AutoCorrect will add the proper character for us. Here, we can see that there are a few symbols already handled by AutoCorrect: copyright, registered, and trademark. You can find AutoCorrect settings on the File tab, under Options > Proofing > AutoCorrect options. AutoCorrect is a feature built into Excel that automatically substitutes one bit of text for another.

One way, that's not obvious, is to use AutoCorrect. There are several different ways to insert symbols and special characters. This includes things like the copyright symbol, math signs, arrows, and the graphics found in fonts like Wingdings. In this lesson we'll look at how to add symbols and other special characters to text in Excel.

Show special characters in excel