RegEx Search

Microsoft Excel is widely employed to keep track of business and personal financial data. It can also be used for other tasks, including generating time schedules and organizing groups of individuals. Given this wide array of applications, numerous add-ins have been created to assist users with managing their data.

One of these plug-ins is RegEx Search, which is a highly efficient word search and replace utility. It requires only that Excel 2000 or later is installed, as the small add-in is both lightweight and easy to understand. Anyone who uses Excel on a regular basis should have no problem finding expressions with this tool.

As with most other add-ons, users can opt for a manual installation of the tool (through the “Add-in Manager” module), or can simply double-click the "excelre.xla" document (the other two XLA files are used in updating the plug-in). Users who have limited permissions should choose the manual installation.

The utility allows users to quickly find text in the worksheet or even the entire workbook. One can access this functionality via the context menu, with the “RegEx Search” option. A great feature is the ability to replace items at the same time one is searching for expressions.

Several other options are available to users, including worksheet functions, data extraction, but also auto shapes tasks (find, replace and grep). All these features can be accessed either via the context menu or with the 'CTRL+R' hotkey.

To conclude, RegEx Search is a valuable tool for anyone who regularly employs Excel for their data management.