How To Use Wildcard In Excel?

Excel has 3 wildcards you can use in your formulas:

  1. Asterisk (*) – zero or more characters.
  2. Question mark (?) – any one character.
  3. Tilde (~) – escape for literal character (~*) a literal question mark (~?), or a literal tilde (~~).

Contents

What is wildcard in Excel?

Wildcard characters in Excel are special characters that can be used to take the place of characters in a formula. They are employed in Excel formulas for incomplete matches. Excel supports wildcard characters in formulas to return values that share the same pattern.

How do you use wildcard characters?

The CHARLIST is enclosed in brackets ([ ]) and can be used with wildcard characters for more specific matches.
Examples of wildcard character pattern matching in expressions.

C haracter(s) Use to match
? or _ (underscore) Any single character
* or % Zero or more characters

How do I use Asterisk in Excel?

The tilde causes Excel to handle the next character literally. In this case we are using “~*” to match a literal asterisk, but this is surrounded by asterisks on either side, in order to match an asterisk anywhere in the cell. If you just want to match an asterisk at the end of a cell, use: “*~*” for the criteria.

How do I filter wildcards in Excel?

#1 Filter Data using Excel Wildcard Characters

  1. Select the cells that you want to filter.
  2. Go to Data –> Sort and Filter –> Filter (Keyboard Shortcut – Control + Shift + L).
  3. Click on the filter icon in the header cell.
  4. In the field (below the Text Filter option), type A*
  5. Click OK.

Why is my wildcard not working Excel?

Make sure your data doesn’t contain erroneous characters. When counting text values, make sure the data doesn’t contain leading spaces, trailing spaces, inconsistent use of straight and curly quotation marks, or nonprinting characters. In these cases, COUNTIF might return an unexpected value.

How do I find and replace wildcard characters in Excel?

Replacing a wildcard character

  1. Press Ctrl + H to open the Find and Replace window.
  2. Press Replace.
  3. If we didn’t use tilde and asterisk (~*), just asterisk (*) the result would be like this.
  4. Excel would treat asterisk as any number of characters (all the text in a cell) and convert it to a word in replace with.

How do you use wildcards to search files and folders?

You can use your own wildcards to limit search results. You can use a question mark (?) as a wildcard for a single character and an asterisk (*) as a wildcard for any number of characters. For example, *. pdf would return only files with the PDF extension.

Can you use a wildcard in an Excel IF statement?

Unlike several other frequently used functions, the IF function does not support wildcards. However, you can use the COUNTIF or COUNTIFS functions inside the logical test of IF for basic wildcard functionality.

How do I filter special characters in Excel?

Re: how to filter special characters in Excel
You can use ‘custom filter’ option available in filter option to find text with special characters. You just need to place ~ before the special character you want to filter.

What does * mean in Excel formula?

In Excel formula, the symbol “*” means multiplication. Say cell A1 contains 5 and cell A2 contains 8.

How do you do a Vlookup with wildcards in Excel?

To use wildcards with VLOOKUP, you must specify exact match mode by providing FALSE or 0 (zero) for the last argument called range_lookup. This expression joins the text in the named range value with a wildcard using the ampersand (&) to concatenate.

How do you use if and?

When you combine each one of them with an IF statement, they read like this:

  1. AND – =IF(AND(Something is True, Something else is True), Value if True, Value if False)
  2. OR – =IF(OR(Something is True, Something else is True), Value if True, Value if False)
  3. NOT – =IF(NOT(Something is True), Value if True, Value if False)

What are wildcards in Windows 10?

The asterisk (*) and question mark (?) are used as wildcard characters, as they are in MS-DOS and Windows. The asterisk matches any sequence of characters, whereas the question mark matches any single character.

How many wild characters are present for searching files folder?

There are two wildcard characters: asterisk (*) and question mark (?). Asterisk (*) – Use the asterisk as a substitute for zero or more characters. e.g., friend* will locate all files and folders that begin with friend. Question mark (?)- Use the question mark as a substitute for a single character in a file name.

How do I search for an exact phrase in Windows 10?

To be able to locate exact phrases, you can try entering the phrase twice in quotes. For example, type “search windows” “search windows” to get all the files containing the phrase search windows. Typing “search windows” will only give you all the files containing search or windows.

How do I match a string in Excel?

Compare two strings

  1. =A1=A2 // returns TRUE.
  2. =EXACT(A1,A2) // returns FALSE.
  3. =IF(EXACT(A2,A2),”Yes”,”No”)

How do you match a name in Excel where it is spelling different?

To match spelling different names, you can use the basic not equal sign ‘<>‘.

  1. First, select the cell where you want to show the spelling differs names.
  2. Here, I selected the H5 cell to place the result.
  3. Now, you can write the formula in the formula bar or into your selected cell.
  4. Type the formula. =B5<>E5.

How do I write regex in Excel?

The methods we can use are:

  1. Test – check if the pattern can be found in the string. Returns True if it is found, False if it isn’t.
  2. Execute – returns occurrences of the pattern matched against the string.
  3. Replace – replaces occurrences of the pattern in the string.

How do I get UTF 8 characters in Excel?

View Unicode characters in Excel:

  1. Open Excel from your menu or Desktop.
  2. Navigate to Data → Get External Data → From Text.
  3. Navigate to the location of the CSV file you want to import.
  4. Choose the Delimited option.
  5. Set the character encoding File Origin to 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) from the drop-down list.

What is the use of * in Excel?

Example

Data
Formula Description
=PRODUCT(A2:A4) Multiplies the numbers in cells A2 through A4.
=PRODUCT(A2:A4, 2) Multiplies the numbers in cells A2 through A4, and then multiplies that result by 2.
=A2*A3*A4 Multiplies the numbers in cells A2 through A4 by using mathematical operators instead of the PRODUCT function.