One way is to have your =vlookup() fix any wild card characters (* and ?) and
the character that's used to indicate that it shouldn't be treated like a wild
card (~):

=VLOOKUP(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"~"," ~~"),"?","~?"),"*","~*"),
Sheet2!$A:$B,2,FALSE)

===
And yep, what you wrote is correct.

TWC wrote:

The "~" symbol should be proceeded by "~" in the function, for example if I
was looking for "123~" or "123?", etc., I would list this as "123~~" or
"123~?" in my function.

"TWC" wrote:

I am using the "vlookup" function and it does not recognize the "~" tilde
symbol in the data I'm looking up. How do I get Excel to recognize the
symbol?

--

Dave Peterson