Wildcard characters such as a ? (question mark) and * (asterisk) are used to represent a single character or any number of characters.
Example:
| ? (question mark) | Finds a single character. For example, d??m finds “doom” and “dorm” |
| * (asterisk) | Finds a number of characters. For example, c*d finds connected and caged |
But, what if you want to replace a wildcard character inside a string?
In this article, I’ll show you how you can do it.
Replacing a wildcard character
- Select a cell with text and a wildcard character.
- Press Ctrl + H to open the Find and Replace window.
- In Find What text area press Shift + ~
- Delete one tilde.
- In the Replace with type a word.
- Press Replace.
This will give us the following result.
If we didn’t use a tilde and asterisk (~*), just asterisk (*) the result would be like this.
Excel would treat an asterisk as any number of characters (all the text in a cell) and convert it to a word in replace with. In our case, it would be “standard”.