How do I find multiple values in Excel?

Your problem is stated in a confusing way. If you have a list of “bogus Area Codes”, then why do you need to look anything up? You have what you want.

On the other hand… let’s say that you have a list of phone numbers with Area Code, and want to look up the AC you have in a list of known ACs. In other words, let’s say that Column C (C2:C200) contains “good Area Codes”.

Then, if your phone numbers (which may contain bad AC information) are in Column A (A2:A5000) you could use this formula to check if the AC appears on your “good” list or not:

At D2 – or wherever else you choose – to check the entry in A2 you could enter:
=if( isna( vlookup( left( A2, 3), $C$2:$C$200, 1, false)), “No Good”, “Valid”)

You can copy that formula down the same column to match every number in your list of phone numbers in A:A.

Caveats:
1. The Area Code information in the phone number has to be the first three characters. If you have 1-xxx- type entries, then the formula will need to be modified or the data normalized.

2. The Area Code listing has to be formatted for “text”, as the phone numbers already will be. “Text strings” won’t look up into (and match) “number” values.

If you kow the bogus codes you can go into the find function (I thinkit is under Edit? I am not on a computer to pull up excell right now) as in find replace, but just use find, put in the number ou are looking for, and it will find all the cells with that number.

You can also sort the column, so all the area codes are in order. Probably do that first. In fact first save your document as is. Then save it again under a new name, can be same name plus the number 1, just so if you make a mistake you have the original saved. Anyway, click at the top of the column so the whole column highlights then click the a/z at the top and it will put everything in order. Expand to include the rows when prompted, so our rows across stay linked, otherwise the computer will sort only the one column you higlighted and not everything one either side of the information.

Hope that helps.

Let me clarify, I’m trying to find the bogus area codes in the list of phone numbers. Basically, cleaning out the bad phone numbers.

Another way to explain it is, I’m looking for different criteria and instead of copying and pasting each area code, I want to run a script or something to search for everything all at once.

@mistic84 Do you know which ones are bogus?

I have a list of bogus codes, so yes.

Hmmm… well, the way new Area Codes are being added, I suspect that your list of “bogus codes” would be getting obsolete as quickly as any list of “good codes” would, and harder to edit. But you’re not asking for that advice.

So, to see if an Area Code associated with a particular phone number is on the ‘bogus’ list (contained in C2:C200 for the purpose of this illustration), simply modify my formula above to:

=if( not( isna( vlookup( left( A2, 3), $C$2:$C$200, 1, false))), “Valid”, “Bogus”)

And, using “find” won’t work?

Or, organizing the numbers in order? If you organize the column it is like alphabetizing. It would line up, for example:
212–555-5678
212–555-7854
212–555-9876
301–555-1627
301–555-3678
301–555-5678
301–555-8907
410–555-6783

Etc.

Then you can just delete the bogus ones. You can delete more than one row at once, so once they are lined up you can do chunks at a time.

Or, are we talking about thousands of numbers? How big is your list?

I discovered a new problem. My “find” is not working at all.

@JLeslie Its not a huge list, but I will have to do it over and over again.