How to Find Cells containing Formulas in Excel

Everyone that uses excel on their daily business certainly came accross with spreadsheets with several cells containing formulas. When these spreadsheets have not been created by us, it can be quite a nightmare to identify all the cells that contain formulas.

Excel "Go to Special" is a very usefull tool when it comes to find cells with formulas. Selecting the "Formulas" radio button will enable all cells that contain formulas. After that you can just change the background color or formating of the enabled cells which will stand out the cells with formulas.

Step by step to stand out the cells with formulas in your worksheet:

1 - Go to ‘Home’ tab > ‘Find & Select’ > ‘Go To Special’. Or just press  'F5' > 'Special' to open the "Go To Special" dialog box.

2 - Select the 'Formulas' radio button, as shown in the picture above and four checkboxes are now enabled (Numbers, Text, Logical, Errors). These checkboxes refer to the return type of the formulas

Example: If you check only the 'Numbers' checkbox then it will search only the cells which contain formulas whose return type is a number.


3 - Now click 'OK' and ALL cells that contain formulas get selected. Please note that in this example all cells with formulas have been selected because we've kept the 4 checkboxes marked.


4 - The last step which will highlight each cell in your spreadsheet that contains a formula is: without clicking anywhere on your speadsheet, change the background color of all the selected cells.


5 - Done. Now all formulas cells are clearly identified.