How-to Find a Wild Card or Question Mark or Asterisk or Tilde in Excel

Lots of users use Excel for lists or you may receive reports from other people or systems and sometimes those files contain Wild Cards or Tilde’s.  If you are trying to Find or Find & Replace those wild cards or tilde’s, you will have a hard time because Excel will use the wild card character as a wild card to find anything, not the wild card character itself.

Here are the Excel Wild Cards:

Wild Cards and Tilde’s

* Asterisk

? Question Mark





~ Tilde

If you want to quickly find a wild card or tilde, you will simply need to add a “~” tilde before the wild card.

Put in this text when trying to Find or Find/Replace Wild Cards and Tilde’s:

~* for an Asterisk

~? for a Question Mark

~~ for a Tilde

So you will notice that you need to put two ~ (Tildes) when you want to find a Tilde.
Video Demonstration

What are you other Tips and Tricks in Excel?  Let me know in the comments below.

Steve=True





2 COMMENTS

  1. Hi
    Why professional do type two different kinds way using index function.For example,they do type this before index function i.e E2=index( or they they type this way after index function this way
    index($B$2:$B$24,match(A2,$A$2:$B$24,0))
    What does it make a huge different in what we are looking for? If I use
    E2=index(—– will give me the last cell value or cell reference and other index($B$2$B$24,match(A2,$A$2:$B$25,0)) will give me the ending or last cell reference or its cell value????

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