Searching for Wildcards

Summary: When using Find or Find and Replace, you can use the question mark and asterisk as wildcards in your search. If you want to search for those actual characters, you must preface them with a tilde, as explained in this tip. (This tip works with Microsoft Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, and Excel 2003.)

You know that you can use the Find (or Replace) option under the Edit menu to locate information in your workbooks. You may even know that you can use question marks (?) and asterisks (*) as wildcard characters, just as you would at a DOS command prompt. What if you want to search for a cell that actually contains an asterisk or a question mark, however?

Excel allows you to search for special characters by preceding the character with the tilde (~). In other words, if you want to search for an asterisk, you would actually search for ~*. If you wanted to search for the question mark, you would search for ~? instead.

Finally, if you wanted to search for the tilde character, you would actually search for ~~. In each instance, the leading tilde informs Excel that the following character should be translated as an actual character, and not as a special wildcard character.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2333) applies to Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003

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Searching for Wildcards