Excel has 3 wildcards you can use in your formulas:
- Asterisk (*) - zero or more characters
- Question mark (?) - any one character
- Tilde (~) - escape for literal character (~*) a literal question mark (~?), or a literal tilde (~~).
How to count wildcard in Excel column?
- The first on the string "Man", on the "Gender" column
- The second for an income value greater than 50,000, on the "Income" column
- The third for an income value lower than 70,000, on the "Income" column
How to filter with multiple criteria or wildcard in Excel?
Things to Remember About Wildcard in Excel
- The wildcard characters need to be used carefully because they can result from other options that can arrive with the same logic. ...
- Wildcard characters can be used in other functions of excel like Vlookup, count, match, etc. ...
- We can also use the combo of Asterisk (*) and question mark (?) in a few situations if required.
How to use wildcard characters in Excel?
We have used the asterisk wildcard in this scenario to do the following, step by step:
- T* indicates that anything that starts with “T” should be included
- T*ck indicates that anything that starts with T and ends with “ck” should be included
- T*ck* indicates anything that starts with “T”, has “ck” inside of it, and anything after “ck” should be included.
Can wildcard be used in Excel filter function?
Wildcard is a term for a special kind of a character that can represent one or more "unknown" characters, and Excel has a wildcard character support. You can use wildcards for filtering, searching, or inside the formulas. In this guide, we're going to show you how to use Excel Wildcard characters for setting up formula criteria. Download Workbook
What is a wildcard in Excel?
The wildcard characters in excel are the most underrated feature of excel, and most of the people don’t know about it. It is a very good to know feature as it can save a lot of time and effort required to do some research in excel. We will learn about excel wildcard characters in detail in this article.
What is the third wildcard character in Excel?
The third wildcard character, which is Tilde (~), is used to identify the wildcard character. We have not come across many situations where we need to use tilde (~), but it’s good to know the feature in excel.
How to use a wildcard in Excel formula
Excel supports wildcard characters in formulas to find values that share a simple pattern. For example, if you are looking for a string with known ending or beginning, and unknown characters in the middle, you can use wildcard characters to tell Excel to look for all compatible matches.
How to use a wildcard in Excel formula
In total, there are 3 wildcard characters you can use in Excel. You can use 2 of them as a replacement of characters, and the third one to prevent the other 2 from being registered as wildcard characters.
What is formulas in Excel?
In this accelerated training, you'll learn how to use formulas to manipulate text, work with dates and times, lookup values with VLOOKUP and INDEX & MATCH, count and sum with criteria, dynamically rank values, and create dynamic ranges. You'll also learn how to troubleshoot, trace errors, and fix problems. Instant access. See details here.
Can you use a countif function with wildcards?
Explanation. Unlike several other frequently used functions, the IF function does not support wildcards. However, you can use the COUNTIF or COUNTIFS functions inside the logical test of IF for basic wildcard functionality. Working from the inside out, the logical test inside the IF function is based on the COUNTIF function: ...
The 3 different wildcards
There are three different wildcards available for use in Excel and as you can imagine, they all have a different application.
The question mark as a wildcard
The question mark as a wildcard takes on the value of any single character.
Using the tilde
What about those situations where you might want to use the wildcard characters themselves as literal characters as a part of our search?
Using wildcards with Excel functions
In addition to using wildcards for filtering and finding data in Excel, there are several functions in which we can also leverage the power of wildcards.
What are the three wildcards in Excel?
Wildcards in Excel are the special characters in excel which takes place of the characters in it, there are three wildcards in excel and they are asterisk, question mark, and tilde, asterisk is used to multiple numbers of characters in excel while question mark is used to represent only a single character whereas tilde is referred to the identification if the wild card character.
What is a wildcard character in Excel?
Wildcard characters special characters that are used to find the result, which is less than exact or accurate. For example, if you have the word “Simple Chat,” and in the database, you have “Simply Chat,” then the common letter in these two words is “Chat,” so using excel wildcard characters, we can match these.
