The following examples will discuss a few common scenarios and warn you about a couple of caveats. The uses of wildcard characters with Excel's Find and Replace feature are quite versatile. In this case, the 1 st and 3 rd asterisks are wildcards, while the second one denotes a literal asterisk character. *~** - finds any data containing an asterisk, e.g.*~? - finds any entry ending with question mark, e.g.The tilde (~) placed before a wildcard character cancels the effect of a wildcard and turns it into a literal asterisk (~*), a literal question mark (~?), or a literal tilde (~~). pri?e - matches price, pride, prize, and the like.?-? - represents any string containing 2 groups of 3 characters separated with a hyphen such as ABC-DEF, ABC-123, 111-222, etc.? - substitutes any two characters, e.g.? - matches any entry containing one character, e.g.It can help you get more specific when searching for a partial match. The question mark (?) represents any single character.

*ch* - represents any word that contains 'ch' in any position such as Chad, headache, arch, etc.*ch - substitutes any text string that ends with 'ch' such as March, inch, fetch, etc.ch* - matches any word that begins with 'ch' such as Charles, check, chess, etc.The asterisk (*) is the most general wildcard character that can represent any number of characters. You can use them as comparison criteria for filtering data, to find entries that have some common part, or to perform fuzzy matching in formulas. Wildcards come handy in any situation when you need a partial match. A tilde (~) forces Excel to treat theses as regular characters, not wildcards. The two common wildcard characters that Excel recognizes are an asterisk (*) and a question mark (?). In other words, when you do not know an exact character, you can use a wildcard in that place. In Microsoft Excel, a wildcard is a special kind of character that can substitute any other character. How to find and replace wildcards in Excel.There are only 3 wildcard characters in Excel (asterisk, question mark, and tilde), but they can do so many useful things! You can think of a wildcard as a joker that can take on any value. When you are looking for something but not exactly sure exactly what, wildcards are a perfect solution. Everything you need to know about wildcards on one page: what they are, how to best use them in Excel, and why wildcards are not working with numbers.

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