Find or Search Data
Finding Cells Containing Specified Data
Using Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel allows users to find cells in a worksheet that contains specified data. If you select Edit from the Find menu in Microsoft Excel, you will see a dialog where you can specify the search value.
Here, we are looking for the value “Oranges”. Aspose.Cells also allows developers to find cells in the worksheet containing specified values.
Using Aspose.Cells
Aspose.Cells provides a class, Workbook, that represents a Microsoft Excel file. The Workbook class contains a worksheets collection that allows access to each worksheet in the Excel file. A worksheet is represented by the Worksheet class. The Worksheet class provides a cells collection that represents all cells in the worksheet. The cells collection provides several methods for finding cells in a worksheet containing user-specified data. A few of these methods are discussed below in more detail.
Finding Cells Containing a Formula
Developers can find a specified formula in the worksheet by calling the cells collection’s find method. Typically, the find method accepts three parameters:
- what: The object to search for. The type should be int,double,DateTime,string,bool.
- previous_cell: Previous cell with the same object. This parameter can be set to null if searching from the start.
- find_options: Options for finding the required object.
The examples below use worksheet data for practicing find methods:
Finding Data or Formulas using FindOptions
It is possible to find specified values using the cells collection’s find method with various FindOptions. Typically, the find method accepts the following parameters:
- what:, the data or value to be searched for.
- previous_cell, the last cell that contained the same value. This parameter can be set to null when searching from the start.
- find_options, the find options.
Finding Cells Containing Specified String Value or Number
It is possible to find specified string values by calling the same find method found in the cells collection with various FindOptions.
Specify the FindOptions.look_in_type and FindOptions.look_at_type properties. The following example code illustrates how to use these properties to find cells with various number of strings at the beginning or at the center or at the end of the cell’s string.