Use of * in Excel

[smartgal]

I am stripping extraneous characters out of some data but having trouble
finding the * character. If I do a find and replace for * to replace with
(delete) it wipes out all the data in that column. Also, I can't filter for
"contains *" because it thinsk all the entries have it. Is * a special
character? Is there anything I can do so the program will recognize it as a
text character rather than as some functional character? Thanks!

 

[Gary''s Student]

try:
~*

 

[Pete_UK]

The asterisk * is used as a wildcard (i.e. any number of characters)
in the operations you have tried. To have Excel treat it as a
character, you must preceed it with a tilde symbol ~, eg in Find/
Replace:

Find What: ~*
Replace with: leave blank

will just remove the asterisk characters.

Hope this helps.

Pete

 

[smartgal]

Brilliant!! Worked like a charm. Any other goofy little characters like
this I might want to keep on my radar?

 

[Dave Peterson]

? is a wild card representing a single character.
* is a wild card representing any number of characters.

You use ~ as the "escape" character which tells excel to look for a real ? or
asterisk.

~? to find ?
~* to find *
~~ to find ~~

 

[Dave Peterson]

? is a wild card representing a single character.
* is a wild card representing any number of characters.

You use ~ as the "escape" character which tells excel to look for a real ? or
asterisk.

~? to find ?
~* to find *
~~ to find ~

(I had too many ~~ in that last one!)