What FIND does
FIND locates one piece of text inside another and returns the starting position as a number. Unlike SEARCH, FIND is case-sensitive and does not support wildcards.
Practical examples
Find a case-sensitive character position
=FIND("M",A2)
If A2 contains Margin, the result is 1.
Start searching after a given position
=FIND("-",A2,5)
This begins searching at the fifth character, which is useful when a string contains repeated separators.
Common mistakes and notes
FIND is case-sensitive
FIND("M","margin") does not match because uppercase and lowercase letters are treated differently.
FIND does not support wildcards
If you need wildcard behavior or case-insensitive matching, use SEARCH instead.
Missing text returns an error
When the target text is not found, FIND returns #VALUE!. Wrap the formula with IFERROR if the worksheet should handle misses gracefully.