Excel: Wildcard (Part 1)

You can use Wildcard characters as comparison criteria for text filters, and when you're searching and replacing content. For example, when you are unsure of what you are looking, wildcards are a perfect solution. You can think of a wildcard as a joker that can take on any value. In Microsoft Excel, a wildcard is a special kind of character that can substitute any other character. In other words, when you do not know an exact character, you can use a wildcard in that place. The two common wildcard characters that Excel recognizes are an asterisk (*) and a question mark (?). A tilde (~) forces Excel to treat theses as regular characters, not wildcards. It come handy in any situation when you need a partial match. You can use them as comparison criteria for filtering data, to find entries that have some common part, or to perform fuzzy matching in formulas. To find a character that Excel recognizes as a wildcard, i.e. a literal asterisk or question mark, include a tilde (~) in your search criteria.

For example, to find all the entries containing asterisks, type ~* in the Find what box. If you'd like to replace the asterisks with something else, switch to the Replace tab and type the character of interest in the Replace with box. To remove all the found asterisk characters, leave the Replace with an empty box, and click Replace all. 

Arguements for Wildcard Function:

• * (asterisk) :- Any number of characters, Like "Hello", "World" etc.
• ? (question mark) :- Any single character, Like "H?llo", "Wor?d" etc.
• ~ (tilde) :- To find question mark or asterisk.