Excel is one of the most powerful tools for analyzing and manipulating data. You can use formulas to quickly extract and analyze data from Excel spreadsheets, but one of the most powerful tools is the "contains" formula. The contains formula allows you to check if a cell contains a specific value or not.

The basic syntax of the contains formula is: =CONTAINS(range,value) where range is the range of cells that you want to look in and value is the value that you want to check for. For example, if you wanted to check if the value “apple” is in cells A1:A5, you would use the formula =CONTAINS(A1:A5,”apple”).

You can also use wildcards in the contains formula. Wildcards are characters that can be used to represent one or more characters. The two most common wildcards are the asterisk (*) which represents any number of characters, and the question mark (?) which represents any single character.

For example, if you want to check if a cell contains a word that starts with the letter “a” and ends with the letter “e”, such as “apple” or “ape”, you would use the formula =CONTAINS(A1:A5,”a*e”). This would return TRUE if any of the cells in the range contained a word that starts with “a” and ends with “e”.

In conclusion, the contains formula is a powerful tool in Excel that can be used to quickly search a range of cells for a specific value or a pattern of values. By understanding how to use this formula, you'll be able to quickly extract and analyze data from your Excel spreadsheets.