Search With Wildcard Excel, Use asterisks (*) for multiple characters and question marks (?) for single characters in the Find and Replace feature to speed up your data editing process. Apply Conditional Formatting to Find the Names with Asterisks. Feb 12, 2025 · Excel contains two functions designed to check the occurrence of one text string inside another: the SEARCH function and the FIND function. In the example shown, the formula in H7 is: =TRANSPOSE((XLOOKUP(H4,D5:D15,B5:E15,"Not found",2))) which performs a wildcard match with the value in H4 and returns all 4 fields as the result. Apply Conditional Formatting to Use Wildcards. Knowing the boundary between where wildcards work and where they silently fail Mar 14, 2023 · Everything you need to know about wildcards: what wildcard characters Excel recognizes, and how to best use them with built-in features and in formulas with text and numbers. Use the Find and Replace features in Excel to search for something in your workbook, such as a particular number or text string. For an example, see the section Wildcard criteria. To use wildcards in Excel, I applied conditional formatting to find a specific name in the dataset. Discover practical examples using *, ?, and ~ in filtering, VLOOKUP (), and more. Jun 11, 2026 · Excel has exactly three wildcard characters: the asterisk (*), the question mark (?), and the tilde (~). You can include wildcard characters such as question marks, tildes, and asterisks, or numbers in your search terms. In this method, I used the COUNTIF function to find names ending with a Specific word “anne”. Apr 9, 2026 · How the SEARCH function works in Excel Master the syntax to find any text string The SEARCH function finds a character or word and returns its starting position. For more information about using wildcard characters with the Find and Replace features in Excel, see Find or replace text and numbers on a worksheet. May 11, 2024 · To perform a partial match with XLOOKUP, supply 2 for the match mode argument to allow wildcards. With XLOOKUP, you can look in one column for a search term, and return a result from the same row in another column, regardless of which side the return column is on. Use the XLOOKUP function when you need to find things in a table or a range by row. Includes examples, VBA code, and a downloadable file. When filtering text data, Excel doesn't distinguish between uppercase and lowercase characters. For example, look up the price of an automotive part by the part number, or find an employee name based on their employee ID. Using pre-defined names You can name a range Criteria, and the reference for the range will appear automatically in the Criteria Apr 14, 2025 · Learn how to check if a cell contains any text using Excel formulas like IF, ISTEXT, LEN, and COUNTIF. Replace one or more characters in the criteria with a wildcard character. . It can return multiple values (spill results) instead of a single cell value. xfk, 6ihm9, mqab, 00v, wqmadkr, ulqem, am, xiom, ahh, wwn6jw,