Excel supports wild cards (* and ?, any set of characters and any single
character).

The tilde is used to tell excel that you don't mean the wildcard--you actually
mean that character ~* and ~?.
Since tilde has a special purpose, you have to treat it special too: ~~.

And if your data has asterisks and question marks, you may want something like:

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

JB2010 wrote:

Hi

I think i must have missed something in my Excel learning...

What's the deal with the "~" symbol?

if you try to look something up & the text has one of those in it, it messes
up the vlookup.

is this a pretty standard thing that has just passed me by all these years?
is there anyway round it?

cheers

jb

--

Dave Peterson