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Dave Peterson Dave Peterson is offline
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Default Use of * in Excel

? is a wild card representing a single character.
* is a wild card representing any number of characters.

You use ~ as the "escape" character which tells excel to look for a real ? or
asterisk.

~? to find ?
~* to find *
~~ to find ~

(I had too many ~~ in that last one!)

Dave Peterson wrote:

? is a wild card representing a single character.
* is a wild card representing any number of characters.

You use ~ as the "escape" character which tells excel to look for a real ? or
asterisk.

~? to find ?
~* to find *
~~ to find ~~

smartgal wrote:

Brilliant!! Worked like a charm. Any other goofy little characters like
this I might want to keep on my radar?

"Gary''s Student" wrote:

try:
~*
--
Gary''s Student - gsnu200777


"smartgal" wrote:

I am stripping extraneous characters out of some data but having trouble
finding the * character. If I do a find and replace for * to replace with
(delete) it wipes out all the data in that column. Also, I can't filter for
"contains *" because it thinsk all the entries have it. Is * a special
character? Is there anything I can do so the program will recognize it as a
text character rather than as some functional character? Thanks!


--

Dave Peterson


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Dave Peterson