Range.FindPrevious Method

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Excel Developer Reference

Continues a search that was begun with the Find method. Finds the previous cell that matches those same conditions and returns a Range object that represents that cell. Doesn’t affect the selection or the active cell.

Syntax

expression.FindPrevious(After)

expression   A variable that represents a Range object.

Parameters

Name Required/Optional Data Type Description
After Optional Variant The cell before which you want to search. This corresponds to the position of the active cell when a search is done from the user interface. Note that After must be a single cell in the range. Remember that the search begins before this cell; the specified cell isn’t searched until the method wraps back around to this cell. If this argument isn’t specified, the search starts before the upper- left cell in the range.

Return Value
Range

Remarks

When the search reaches the beginning of the specified search range, it wraps around to the end of the range. To stop a search when this wraparound occurs, save the address of the first found cell, and then test each successive found-cell address against this saved address.

Example

This example shows how the FindPrevious method is used with the Find and FindNext methods. Before running this example, make sure that Sheet1 contains at least two occurrences of the word “Phoenix” in column B.

Visual Basic for Applications 
  Sub FindTest()
    Dim fc As Range
    Set fc = Worksheets("Sheet1").Columns("B").Find(what:="Phoenix")
    MsgBox "The first occurrence is in cell " & fc.Address
    Set fc = Worksheets("Sheet1").Columns("B").FindNext(after:=fc)
    MsgBox "The next occurrence is in cell " & fc.Address
    Set fc = Worksheets("Sheet1").Columns("B").FindPrevious(after:=fc)
    MsgBox "The previous occurrence is in cell " & fc.Address
End Sub

See Also