Excel Tip: How to Use Find & Replace to Remove Wildcard Characters in Excel (with video tutorial)

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Did you know you can use Find & Replace to remove wildcard characters in Excel? You can use it to delete question marks, asterisks, or tildes – so long as you know the “special trick.”

The Scenario

You received a spreadsheet in which someone used asterisks to flag certain items. You, however, need to remove all the asterisks to do your work.

But finding and deleting each asterisk manually will take hours!!!!

You usually use Find & Replace to find and delete content. Except, you tried this, and all your data disappeared!!

Suggested: How to Use Find & Replace in Excel – Video Tutorial

What are the Wildcard Characters in Excel?

Wildcard characters are special characters you can use to search through content in Excel when you’re unsure of what the actual character in the cell is or when there’s variation in the content you’re working with.

Suggested: Using Wildcard Characters in Excel

Excel has three wildcard characters. They are the:

1. Asterisk (*)
2. Question mark (?) and
3. Tilde (~)

Because of this (very important!) role they play, Excel treats them differently than other characters.

This special treatment is why you can get errors when using one of these characters in Find & Replace. You can end up with disappearing content or content being replaced by, well, gibberish!

So, to get Excel to treat these wildcards as “regular characters,” you have to transform them into regular characters.

It sounds confusing, but, in short, all you need to do is place a tilde (~) in front of the wildcard character.

How to Remove Asterisks (*) in Excel with Find & Replace

You can use Find & Replace to remove asterisks in Excel by placing a tilde before the asterisk.

For example, in the Find & Replace fields you would type:

• Find What: ~*
• Replace With: Nothing. To delete any asterisks, leave this field blank.

How to Remove Question Marks (?) in Excel with Find & Replace

Likewise, you can use Find & Replace to remove question marks in Excel by placing a tilde before the question mark.

For example, in the Find & Replace fields you would type:

• Find What: ~?
• Replace With: Nothing. To delete any question marks, leave this field blank.

How to Remove Tildes (~) in Excel with Find & Replace

To use Find & Replace to remove tildes in Excel, you would place two tildes in the Find field of Find & Replace.

For example, in the Find & Replace fields you would type:

• Find What: ~~
• Replace With: Nothing. To delete any tildes, leave this field blank.

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FYI: This tutorial was created using the desktop version of Excel in Microsoft 365.