Is there a way in VBA to have the SEARCH function only pick up cells that includes the "exact" text instead of similar text?

Solution 1:

You need to check if the cell starts/ends with Fee or if it's equal to fee.

My formula in column B is:

=IF(SUM(COUNTIF(A2;{"fee";"* fee";"fee *"}))>0;"Fee";"Other")

Solution 2:

If the contents is a multi-word string, you need to include delimiters.

In the formula below, I used space as the delimiter. Note that I added a space before and after the string being searched, and also used SUBSTITUTE to remove any punctuation. I only removed the dot, but, depending on your data, you may need to nest some SUBSTITUTE functions to also remove other punctuation (eg comma, exclamatdion points, etc)

=ISNUMBER(SEARCH(" fee "," " & SUBSTITUTE(G2,".","") & " "))