Finding formulas or displaying them can help troubleshoot or improve upon a spreadsheet. In this guide, we're going to show you how to find formulas in Excel.
Go To Special
Go To Special is tool for finding not just formulas, but also other special items like cells with Notes, Comments, or Blanks or objects, etc. Using this method, you can quickly select all cells containing formulas and highlight them for better visibility.
You can access the Go To Special menu in two ways.
- Click the command from Home > Find & Select.
- Open the Go To dialog by pressing Ctrl + G and click the Special button.
Once the Go To Special dialog is open, select the Formulas option. If you want to select all formulas, including their cells, regardless of what the formulas return, make sure that all options are selected. When you're done click OK to apply your selection.
In a similar manner, disabling the value types you don't want to see will prevent those cells from being displayed. For example, if you only have the Text option checked, you will see that formulas that return a numerical value will not be selected.
If you still want to find all formulas, you can use the shortcut command in Find & Select.
Note that Excel doesn't check values of any spilled formulas.
Finding formulas by showing the formulas instead of results
Another way to find the formulas in Excel is displaying the formulas instead of their outcomes. To do this, you can either use the command in the Ribbon or press its shortcut.
- Click Show Formulas, select the Formula tab and go to the Formula Auditing section
- Press Ctrl + `
After enabling this, you will see the formulas in cells.
If you want more information about auditing formulas, check out Identifying and Analyzing Spreadsheets: Formula Auditing.
