
So you can use a wildcard character in many innovative ways.

But in addition to the data in example 1, we have a table with an initial reference of company name in column E. We will take a similar example of example 1. Like we used to find and replace with the help of wildcard character, we can also use wildcard characters in excel Vlookup. You can see that the companies’ name in row 3, 7 & 8 is changed to “Prem Group of Companies”.Įxample #3 – Vlookup Using Wildcard Character After clicking on the “Replace All” button, we will get the below dialog box.Now click on “ Replace All” button so that it will replace all the name of the companies which has “prem” in its name with “Prem Group of Companies”.In the Replace with the option, Enter the word “ Prem Group of Companies”.In the Find what field, enter the word “ *Prem*” to search the name of the companies with “Prem” in its name.Press CTRL + H in Excel, and you will see the below screen open.So for doing this, you need to follow the below steps. So in this example, we will try to find the companies that have “prem” in their name and replace the name of the company with the name “Prem Group of Companies”. In the first example, we filtered the companies’ name, which has “Prem” in their name. The area where we can use the wildcard characters effectively to find and replace words in Excel. Let us take a similar example of what we used in Example 1. As you can see, all the three companies which have “Prem” in their name has been filtered and selected.Įxample #2 – Find and Replace Using Wildcard Character.In the search field, type “ *Prem*” and click on OK.Once the filter is applied, go to column A, “Customer Name”, and click on the drop-down box.Let’s now look at the below examples to use wildcard characters in Excel.įollow the below steps to search and filter the companies which have “Prem” in their name. We have not come across many situations where we need to use tilde (~), but it’s good to know the feature in excel. The third wildcard character, which is Tilde (~), is used to identify the wildcard character. Tilde (~) – We have already seen two wild characters, Asterisk (*) and Question Mark (?). So here, the question mark represents a single character which is M or D.ģ.

Question Mark (?) – The Question marks are used for a single character.įor Example,?ove could mean Dove or Move. So * before ing could mean to select only words that end with ‘ing’, and it doesn’t matter what words or number of characters are there before ing.Ģ. You can similarly start the search with Asterisk.įor Example, *ing it could mean Starting, Ending, Beginning. So * after Br could mean to select only words which start with Break it doesn’t matter what words or number of characters are thereafter Br.
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Asterisk (*) – The Asterisk represents any number of characters in the text string.įor Example, when you type Br*, it could mean Break, Broke, Broken. These three wildcard characters definitely have a different purpose from each other.ġ. There are 3 Wildcard Characters in Excel: Excel functions, formula, charts, formatting creating excel dashboard & others
