* causing problems with finding duplicates with conditional format

[Michele - DARCC]

I'm using conditional formatting to highlight duplicates in EXCEL 2007. The
column I need to locate duplicates in has '*' in it. As a result it is
considering the following to be duplicates.

2284Hill*9
2284Hill*89

Is there any way to tell EXCEL not to interpret the * as a universal
character in either 'COUNTIF' or conditional formating OR in a Find/Replace
so I can change it to something else?

 

[Pete_UK]

In Find/Replace you can specify:

Find what: ~*
Replace with: _ (for example)
click Replace All

The tilde symbol ~ tells Excel to treat the * as a normal character
and not a wildcard character. In this example the * would be replaced
with an underscore.

Hope this helps.

Pete