You can use the following formula to check if a given cell in Excel contains a question mark anywhere in the cell:
=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("~?", A2)), "Yes", "No")
This particular formula checks if cell A2 contains a question mark and returns “Yes” if it does.
Otherwise, it returns “No.”
Note: The tilde symbol (~) in Excel indicates that the next character is a literal.
The following example shows how to use this formula in practice.
Example: Search for Question Mark in Cell in Excel
Suppose we have the following list of phrases in Excel:
Suppose we would like to search each phrase in column A to determine if it contains a question mark or not.
To do so, we can type the following formula into cell B2:
=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("~?", A2)), "Yes", "No")
We can then click and drag this formula down to each remaining cell in column B:
The formula returns “Yes” if the phrase contains a question mark.
Otherwise, it returns “No” if no question mark is found.
For example, we can see:
- The first phrase does not contain a question mark.
- The second phrase does contain a question mark.
- The third phrase does contain a question mark.
And so on.
Note that if you’d like to return values other than “Yes” and “No”, simply replace these values in the formula with whatever values you’d like.
Also note that you can use the following formula to return TRUE or FALSE to indicate whether a cell contains a question mark or not:
=ISNUMBER(SEARCH("~?", A2))
The following screenshot shows how to use this formula in practice:
The formula returns TRUE or FALSE to indicate whether each phrase contains a question mark or not.
Additional Resources
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Excel:
Excel: How to Search for an Asterisk in a Cell
Excel: How to Find Unique Values from Multiple Columns
Excel: How to Match Two Columns and Return a Third