Find and Replace Tildes and Wildcard Characters

This post will guide you how to find or replace a character such as a tilde, an asterisk or a question mark using Find & Replace function in excel. How to find or replace wildcard characters in excel.

Wildcards are special characters that can be used to take any place of any character. And there are three wildcard characters in excel: asterisk (*), question mark (?) and tilde. And the asterisk character can be used to represents any number of characters. The question mark can be used to represents only one single character. And the tilde can be used to identify a wildcard character in the text string.

So Excel use the tilde (~) as a marker to indicate that the next character is a literal. When you want to use the Find and Replace function to find or replace wildcard character, you must add a tilde (~) before the character in the Find What box.

Find and Replace Tildes and Wildcard Characters


To find and replace wildcard characters in excel, you can follow these steps:

#1 Select the range of cells that you want to find or replace the wildcard characters.

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#2 go to HOME tab, click Find&Select command under Editing group. Or you can press Ctrl +H keys to open the Find and Replace dialog box directly. The Find and Replace dialog box will appear.

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#3 switch to Replace tab, type ~* in the Find what text box, then type the replaced characters in the Replace with box. Click Replace All button.

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#4 you will see that all the asterisk character are replaced with the specified character in your selected range.

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