Normally, If you want to write an IF formula for text values in combining with the below two logical operators in excel, such as: “equal to” or “not equal to”.

Excel IF function check if a cell contains text(case-insensitive)

By default, IF function is case-insensitive in excel. It means that the logical text for text values will do not recognize case in the IF formulas. For example, the following two IF formulas will get the same results when checking the text values in cells.

=IF(B1="excel","yes","no")
=IF(B1="EXCEl","yes","no")

The IF formula will check the values of cell B1 if it is equal to “excel” word, If it is TRUE, then return “yes”, otherwise return “no”. And the logical test in the above IF formula will check the text values in the logical_test argument, whatever the logical_test values are “Excel”, “eXcel”, or “EXCEL”, the IF formula don’t care about that if the text values is in lowercase or uppercase, It will get the same results at last.

Excel IF function check if a cell contains text (case-sensitive)

If you want to check text values in cells using IF formula in excel (case-sensitive), then you need to create a case-sensitive logical test and then you can use IF function in combination with EXACT function to compare two text values. So if those two text values are exactly the same, then return TRUE. Otherwise return FALSE.

So we can write down the following IF formula combining with EXACT function:

=IF(EXACT(B1,"excel"),"yes","no")

Excel IF function check if part of cell matches specific text

If you want to check if part of text values in cell matches the specific text rather than exact match, to achieve this logic text, you can use IF function in combination with ISNUMBER and SEARCH Function in excel.

Both ISNUMBER and SEARCH functions are case-insensitive in excel.

=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("x",B1)),"good","bad")

For above the IF formula, it will Check to see if B1 contain the letter x.

Also, we can use FIND function to replace the SEARCH function in the above IF formula. It will return the same results.

 Excel IF function with Wildcards text value

If you wan to use wildcard charcter in an IF formula, for example, if any of the values in column B contains “*xc*”, then return “good”, others return “bad”. You can not directly use the wildcard characters in IF formula, and we can use IF function in combination with COUNTIF function. Let’s see the following IF formula:

=IF(COUNTIF(B1:B4,"*xc*"), "good","bad")

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Related Formulas

• Excel IF Function With Numbers
  If you want to check if a cell values is between two values or checking for the range of numbers or multiple values in cells, at this time, we need to use AND or OR logical function in combination with the logical operator and IF function…

Related Functions

• Excel EXACT function
  The Excel SEARCH function returns the number of the starting location of a substring in a text string.The syntax of the EXACT function is as below:= EXACT (text1,text2)…
• Excel COUNTIF function
  The Excel COUNTIF function will count the number of cells in a range that meet a given criteria.= COUNTIF (range, criteria) …
  
• Excel ISNUMBER function
  The Excel ISNUMBER function returns TRUE if the value in a cell is a numeric value, otherwise it will return FALSE.
• Excel IF function
  The Excel IF function perform a logical test to return one value if the condition is TRUE and return another value if the condition is FALSE….
• Excel SEARCH function
  The Excel SEARCH function returns the number of the starting location of a substring in a text string.…