Excel - Search and Replace wildcard characters

Excel has a great search and replace tool that lets you quickly search for and replace any character in your spreadsheet. It also has two wildcards characters - * ? – that let you search a for a broad range of possible results.

The asterisk looks for any number of characters used in a search, so:

A search *west might find West, Northwest and Southwest.

A question mark looks for a single character, so:

A search for c?n may find can, con, c4n, or c_n.

There is a problem when you want to search and/or replace a wildcard character. The solution to this is to precede the wildcard character with the ~ (tilde) character. To search for instances of 12* you would type 12~* in the search and find box.