The user who posted this question got their answer, but the problem they ran into is worth examining. Their formula returned false because they were trying to match "BAP2" against "IH BAP 2" using a wildcard, and the spreadsheet interpreted the space and the number differently than expected. This is not a failure of the user's understanding, it is a failure of the tool to handle what should be a simple, human request.
Traditional lookup functions like HLOOKUP and XLOOKUP are designed for exact matches or pattern matches with wildcards, but they are brittle when the data contains extra spaces, inconsistent formatting, or partial string overlaps. In this medical office scenario, the data in column B had a prefix ("IH") and a space before the number "2," while column A stored the code as a single string without spaces. The spreadsheet saw two different values. A human sees the same information. That gap between how we think about data and how spreadsheets process it is exactly where productivity goes to die.
The solution the community provided likely involved a combination of functions like SEARCH, FIND, or TEXTJOIN with ISNUMBER to check if the substring exists anywhere in the target cell. That works, but it requires the user to know that spreadsheets do not natively understand "contains" as a relationship between cells. They have to build that logic manually. For a medical office managing patient codes or billing identifiers, this is not an edge case, it is the daily reality of reconciling records from different systems. Every manual formula introduced is a point where errors can creep in, and every workaround adds friction to an already demanding workflow.
Even experienced spreadsheet users are spending time fighting the tool instead of solving the underlying problem. The data is clean enough for a person to see the match instantly, yet the software demands a precise syntax that punishes minor variations. An AI-native spreadsheet would treat this as a natural language query: "Does column B contain the value from column A?" That question should not require a forum post. It should be a single, intuitive action. The technology exists to make this feel obvious, and the only reason it feels difficult today is that legacy tools were built for exactness over understanding. The real takeaway is not that the user needed a better formula, it is that the formula itself should have been unnecessary.