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How to Check If a Value is in a Range in Google Sheets

Sometimes when working in spreadsheet programs like Google Sheets, you may want to perform a task, but you may not know the best way to accomplish this.

For example, one common task that many spreadsheet users need to do is to search a range of cells to see if a certain value exists inside the range. That is pretty easy to do with a simple function.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to check if a value exists in a range of cells in Google Sheets.

Check if Value is in Range

Whether you are searching for a text value or numeric value inside a range, the best way to accomplish this task is by using the COUNTIF function.

The COUNTIF function runs a conditional search across a range of cells that will return a count of the number of times a specified value appears in a range.

By using this to search for a value, if the value appears in that range, COUNTIF will return a 1 or greater.

The syntax of COUNTIF is:

=COUNTIF(range, criterion)

  • range – this is the range of cells that you are searching for your value in
  • criterion – this is the value that you are searching for inside of your range

Here is how this can be used to search for a value inside a range of cells:

COUNTIF find value

You can see in the example above that my formula is searching the range of data that I have in A2:A11 for my criteria in C2. If the value exists, my formula will return a 1. If it does not exist it will return a 0.

With this method, you can search for numbers, text values, and more.

Closing Thoughts

If you need to quickly search a range of cells to see if it contains a specific value, the COUNTIF function is the fastest way to do this.

As a daily spreadsheet user, this is one of the most common functions that I use on a day-to-day basis, so you really take the time to learn how to use this.

More Google Sheets Tutorials:
How to Count Unique Values
Check If Cell Contains Formula
How to Extract Numbers or Text from a String