We will discuss wildcard characters in this blog. People who have worked on any SQL, must be knowing about the wildcard characters and their uses. People who have not worked on SQL here is a brief about the wildcard characters we have in Excel.
Wildcard characters * (asterisk), ? (question mark), ~(tilde) followed by a * or ? or ~.
Usage of asterisk (*) in Excel:
Asterisk is used when we want to search a string which starts/ends with a specific word or pattern.
Asterisk is also used to search a pattern if the pattern is appearing in middle of the word.
Example and usage of Asterisk:
We have a few string values in a range and we are passing few conditions with the use of wildcard characters:
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| "*ex" in the filter condition |
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| "*ex*" in the filter condition |
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| "ex*" in the filter condition |
Question mark (?) can be used when you want to search a string with one variable character. For example: you have strings ABC and ACC, if you give “A?C” in filter condition, excel will show both the strings.
So where do we use wildcard character tilde (~)?
The answer is when you want to search a wildcard character in the sheet, you have to use tilde before the character to search it. Let’s take the same example we have used above. I have appended an asterisk to at the end of the list.
Now if I want to filter only the character * so that filter returns the last row from the list. If I write * in the filter condition, the filter will display the entire list instead of just the last row. So what do I do to get just the last row?
I need to use the tilde wildcard character. To search a wildcard character from the list/sheet, write tilde just before character in the filter condition:
You will find the required result.
Important
Wildcard characters can be used in Find functionality and formulas in Excel.
To know more about usage of wildcard characters in the formula and Find functionality contact me on : support@excelvba.org
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