5 Things to avoid in MS Excel
November 19, 2019
November 2019 update
December 13, 2019
⦁ Introduction
Wildcards are used as placeholders in excel. They are special characters that can take on any value they want to.
There are 3 wildcard characters in excel:
⦁ Asterisk (*) – Represents any number of characters
⦁ Question Mark (?) – Represents a single character
⦁Tilde (~) – Represents the literal meaning of any character (“?” Or “*” preceded by a “~” will not work as a wildcard but it will represent “?” or “*” itself)
Wildcard Usage Example:
| Wildcard | Represents | Input | Output Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| ? | One character | d?g | dog / dig / dug |
| ?? | Two characters | j??k | jack / jock / junk |
| ??? | Three characters | a???t | adopt / alert / audit |
| * | Any Number of characters | * | excel / microsoft / powerpoint |
| * - at the start | Ends with "end" | *end | friend / dividend / amend |
| * - at the end | Starts with "st" | st* | start / statistics / string |
| * - in between | Contains "has" somewhere | *has* | emphasize / aghast / She has a ball |
| ~ with ? | Ends with "?" | *~? | Do you have a ball? / Anybody Listening? |
| ~ with * | Ends with "*" | *~* | Important* |
Wildcards has its use in the following functions:
⦁ Filtering Data
⦁ Find and Replace
⦁ COUNTIF and SUMIF
⦁ VLookup
Contributor: Raj Rajeshwar Sharma
Third year B.Com (Hons) student at St. Xavier's College, Kolkata. I am pursuing CFA. I have been working at Leveraged Growth as a Finance intern for the past 3 months. I am a Finance enthusiast with keen interest in learning different programming languages.
