How do I search without wildcards?

[Guest]

Hi, I'm trying to perform a search in a worksheet containing wildcard
characters (? and *) and I need to be able to find cells with the wildcard
characters themselves, e.g.
A1: What is your name?
A2: Your rating is *****
A3: This cell contains no wildcards.

If I press Ctrl+F (Find) and search for "?", it matches any single character
(rather than the ? character in cell A1). If I search for "*", it matches
any cell with values in (rather than the any of 5 stars in cell A2).

Is there a way of disabling wildcard matching or "escaping" the wildcard
characters themselves?

 

[Guest]

If you want to find an actual question mark or asterisk, type a tilde (~)
before the character.

 

[Niek Otten]

Use ~* and ~? to search

--
Kind regards,

Niek Otten
Microsoft MVP - Excel

| Hi, I'm trying to perform a search in a worksheet containing wildcard
| characters (? and *) and I need to be able to find cells with the wildcard
| characters themselves, e.g.
| A1: What is your name?
| A2: Your rating is *****
| A3: This cell contains no wildcards.
|
| If I press Ctrl+F (Find) and search for "?", it matches any single character
| (rather than the ? character in cell A1). If I search for "*", it matches
| any cell with values in (rather than the any of 5 stars in cell A2).
|
| Is there a way of disabling wildcard matching or "escaping" the wildcard
| characters themselves?

 

[Guest]

This raises a new question - how do I search for "~"? Do I use "~~"?

Thanks for the quick response, either way.

 

[CyberTaz]

You got it!

 

[Dave Peterson]

Yep.

(But it would have been quicker to test it yourself.)

 

[Guest]

Ah yes, but this is supposed to act as an archive of questions - if I ask and
someone answers this only needs to be done once

 

[Pete_UK]

Yes, but someone asked the same thing yesterday!

Pete

 

[Dave Peterson]

Or you could have tested, then posted your results.

Then the archives would have been complete and you still would know the answer
<g>.