Asterisks are wildcards in Edit/Replace so you need to indicate to Excel that
you want to actually match the literal asterisk. The tilde (~) is used for
that, as follows:

Select the range to be impacted.

From the Excel main menu:
<edit<replace
Find what: ~*~*
Replace with: 0
Click the [Replace All] button

That will replace all double-asterisks with zero.

Does that help?
***********
Regards,
Ron

XL2002, WinXP


" wrote:

hi there.
i am working with a very big dataset. i have some obs in a cell of a
column where data appears as ** and i want to replace it with zero. but
while trying to use the find replace in edit menu, it doesnt work. Does
anyone has an idea of how to solve this problem?
Another thing is, when trying to convert the excel file into csv file
why does 11-9011 in orginal excel file gets convereted into date format
in csv file?
This thing is buggin me .
please let me know, if you guys have any solution.