How to find or replace asterisk(*) and question mark(?) in MS excel??

Clever Excel formulas March 30th, 2008

Did you ever wonder why can’t you find asterisk and question mark in your spreadsheet.This article explains it all.

Asterisk and question mark are excel’s wildcard characters. The strange thing about them is, if you try to search or replace them in excel they won’t show up. Like if you ever try to replace the star key with a blank in excel, your whole spreadsheet will go blank.

To overcome this problem, you need to add tilde(~) key before the multiplication sign(*) or question mark sign in find and replace box.

This can come in very handy when in your formulas, you have entered multiplication sign instead of division sign and you want to replace all of them with the correct one.

Reader's Comments

Joe B. | October 21st, 2008 at 12:19 am
Worked great! Thanks!
Steve | March 28th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Thanks for this information! I was going crazy trying to figure this out.
TonyS | April 13th, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Awesome! You’d think Microsoft would put this in their help files, but alas, we have to rely on others with more information….as usual.

Thanks again!
Trinity | May 10th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
I’ve been stuck on this in the past, so glad to have a solution for the future.

Thank you!
asaf pridir | August 9th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
you are a life saver!
Kaige | August 12th, 2009 at 12:06 am
Thanks! This is the first place I found the solution, then I checked the help file.

@TonyS
Actually, it is in the help file, but difficult to find if just using the search. The context help from the Find and Replace dialog, though, does link directly to the solution.
Iva | November 10th, 2009 at 8:13 pm
Thank you - it’s very helpful for me:)