Why does search (ctrl-F) in Excel not work?

Searching for a string in Excel (via ctrl-F) comes up with "We could't find what your looking for". The below screenshot tells the whole story.

Why is this?

3 Answers

The "funky character" theory is confirmed.

The text I was searching for had a plain space in it, but the contents of the cell I circled in red (in the image) has octal characters \302 \240 which, according to Unix Stack Exchange is a "non-breaking space".

So, it looks like I'm screwed with plain text searches on this daily spreadsheet which usually contains 350 or so rows. Sigh... (for the third time)

Just click the dropdown beside the format button in the FIND tool and click the "Clear Find Format" and everything will be alright again.

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In some cases, it might be because of values from VLOOKUP. Just copy paste the values you are searching for as 'paste only values' and try. It worked for me.