How To Insert A Wildcard In Excel

How To Insert A Wildcard In Excel

What is a Wildcard?

A wildcard is a special character that let’s you perform “fuzzy” matching on text in your Excel formulas.

For example, this formula:

=COUNTIF(A2:A9,”*sub”)

Let start by creating data for the same. Now suppose we want to count the texts in column A which contains the word “sub”, this can be easily done by using wildcard “*sub” in the countif formula:

=COUNTIF(A2:A9,”*Sub”)

Lets us discuss another common wildcard: =COUNTIF(A2:A9,”?????”)

This will count the cells with 5 alphabet strings:

Input values:

text

Dim Sub

Sub Word

Text5

Text4

Text5

Text

sub

Text

sub

new Sub

word

Results: 3

Reason:

Text5

Text4

Text5

Please find below some of the wildcard examples we generally use:

Template

Further reading: 
Basic concepts 
Getting started with Excel
Cell References