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Use wildcard characters as comparison criteria for text filters, and when you're searching and replacing content. These can also be used in Conditional Formatting rules that use the "Format cells that contain specific text" criteria.

For more about using wildcard characters with the Find and Replace features in Excel, see Find or replace text and numbers on a worksheet.

Use

To find

? (question mark)

Any single character
For example, sm?th finds "smith" and "smyth"

* (asterisk)

Any number of characters
For example, *east finds "Northeast" and "Southeast"

~ (tilde) followed by ?, *, or ~

A question mark, asterisk, or tilde
For example, fy06~? finds "fy06?"

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