The tilde is sort of what you might call a wildcard "delimiter". It tells
Excel that the common wildcards, * and ?, are not wildcards in certain uses.

For example:

A1 = AA
A2 = XX
A3 = X?
A4 = GH

The lookup value in B1 is X?.

If you use:

=MATCH(B1,A1:A4,0)

The result will be 2 because Excel sees the ? as a wildcard and XX matches
that criteria. So, the tilde is used to tell Excel that in this case the ?
is not a wildcard and is in fact just a common question mark:

So, you can make the lookup value in B1: X~?

=MATCH(B1,A1:A5,0) = 3 (X?)

Or, make the lookup value in B1: X

=MATCH(B1&"~?",A1:A5,0) = 3 (X?)

Biff

"IanW" wrote in message
.243...
Thanks for the reply(s). Actually I had a double trailing '~' so I would
have needed '~~~~'. I did think of checking if teh ~ was a special char.

Just did look now but can't find anything about it (easily) in the help.
What is ~ used for?

Thanks
Ian

"Biff" wrote in
:

The tilde is a special character in Excel.

A4 = d~

Lookup value in B1 = d~

=MATCH(B1&"~", A1:A6, 0)

Or, make the lookup value: d~~ (that's d and 2 tildes)

=MATCH(B1, A1:A6, 0)

Biff