Explanation

Excel wildcards can be used to replace any character in Excel and allow the user to perform advanced searches and partial matching.

There are two wildcards in Excel:

? (Question Mark) – Replaces one character

* (Asterisk) – Replaces between 0 to any amount of characters.

In addition to these two signs, we can use the ~ (tilde) character when we want to escape these explicit characters.  

Example

For this example, we will use the COUNTIF function to count the number of words that meet certain wildcard criteria!

Practice Excel Wildcards

Now, time to put our knowledge in Excel Wildcards into practice! 🙂

Using SUMIF with Excel Wildcards

Now, let’s use the SUMIF function combined with the power of Excel Wildcards! 🙂

Counting using Excel Wildcards

Use the COUNTIF function to solve this one!