Delete Asterisk besides Numbers in a Cell

[O. Olson]

Hi,

I have an Excel Spreadsheet with numbers. Some of the numbers have an
Asterisk besides them.
E.g.
324*

Is there a simple way to delete all Asterisk's in the entire
spreadsheet. (There are no other Asterisk's than these unwanted ones.)

If I use the Find and Replace i.e. search for * and keep the replace
thing blank - it deletes the entire sheet.

Any ideas?

Thanks a lot.
O.O.

 

[T. Valko]

Try this:

Precede the * with a tilde character:

Edit>Replace
Find what: ~*
Replace with: nothing, leave this blank
Replace All

 

[O. Olson]

Thanks Biff. This works for me. By the way - what does the tilde
character do/mean i.e. what is its significance.

Regards,
O.O.

 

[T. Valko]

In some uses the * is a wildcard character and Find/Replace is one of those
uses. The tilde character tells Excel that in this use the * is not a
wildcard but just a regular character.

 

[O. Olson]

Thanks Biff for your explanation. This is something I did not know.
Regards,
Rio

 

[T. Valko]

You're welcome!

That's why when you used just the * as the Find criteria Excel "deleted" the
entire sheet of data.

It interpreted that to mean Find *anything* and replace it with nothing.

 

[O. Olson]

Sorry, I did not notice that you had posted.

Thanks for your explanation. I figured out that Excel is taking my *
as a wild card - but I was looking for an option to enable or disable
the wild cards like we have in the MS Word Find dialog.

Thanks again.
O.O.

 

[T. Valko]

No option in Excel like that. All you can do is as I described, preceed the
wildcard with a tilde. This applies to the ? (question mark) and ~ (tilde)
wildcards as well.

~?
~~