How to Create a Search Bar in Excel (No VBA)

Still hitting Ctrl+F to hunt through a thousand rows?

In this tutorial we add a real search bar to your worksheet — type into the box
and the results filter instantly, live, as you type. It looks like something
from a proper application, and it takes about seven minutes to build.

No VBA. One formula and one text box.

Watch: a live search bar in 7 minutes

Prefer reading? The same steps are written out below the video.

Step-by-step

Instead of clicking through Ctrl+F matches one at a time, you’ll add a search box that instantly filters a table and shows only the matching rows. The example is a sales table with sales representatives’ names in column C. The FILTER function needs Excel 365 or Excel 2021.

1. Show the Developer tab

If it isn’t in your ribbon, right-click the ribbon, choose Customize the Ribbon, tick Developer and click OK.

2. Insert the search box

Go to Developer > Insert and choose Text Box from the ActiveX Controls. Click and drag to draw it where people will see it.

3. Link it to a cell

Right-click the text box, choose Properties, and in LinkedCell enter an out-of-the-way cell such as K2. Whatever is typed in the box now appears in K2. Close the Properties window and click Design Mode on the Developer tab to switch it off.

4. Add the FILTER formula

Pick an empty area for the results (H5 in the example), so you don’t overwrite your data, and enter:

=FILTER(B5:F504,ISNUMBER(SEARCH(K2,C5:C504)),"Not found")

Change B5:F504 to your whole table, and C5:C504 to the column you want to search.

How the formula works

SEARCH looks for the text in K2 inside each name. If it finds it, it returns the position where the match starts (for example, 1 if “Mike” is the start of “Mike Johnson”). If not, it returns an error.
ISNUMBER turns those results into TRUE (a match) or FALSE (no match).
FILTER keeps only the rows where the result is TRUE. If nothing matches, it shows “Not found” instead of an error.

Try it

Type Frank in the box and every Frank appears. Type Smith and every rep with that surname shows up. Because SEARCH matches part of the text and ignores case, you can search by first name, surname or just a few letters.

Go further

My Excel Dashboard & Data Analysis Masterclass course builds 10 interactive dashboards from scratch, using techniques like this one.