God bless you. The backslash was the problem the whole time. How embarrassing! Ty!

The original excel formula is this: =IF(J2=“History”,”level2,IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH("ICU”,level2)),"ICU”,”level3)). I want to use the script to insert this as text into the cell E2 but AppleScript won't take the formula as text and instead turns History into a variable even if I put quotes "" around the whole thing.