Tilde (~) Magic in Excel
No matter what we do as an IT professional, MS Excel is something we can't imagine a day without it. Yes, I do love working with Excel and hope you too.
Have you ever tried finding or filtering columns by a '?' or an '*' sign in your Excel sheet? please try you will enjoy it.
There are some wildcard characters (i.e. '?', '*'), and they have a different meaning inside Excel. For example the '?' character behaves like a wildcard that could mean any single character.
- ? = a
- ? = Z
- ?? = 1c
Sometimes we want the '?' to be treated as a normal character, not a wildcard. We might need to find all the '?' entries in my Excel sheet and replace them with some other character/string, or probably we need to filter a Column to find out how many rows got '?' as value.
Tiled '~' is the lifesaver.
Trust me, next time you need to find '?' or '*' or '~' itself. Try clubbing these special characters prefixed with '~' sign and then do a Find or Filter.
Example: instead of finding '?' find '~?', and for '~' try '~~'
You are welcome.
Please let me know if you want to use '~' in your VLOOKUP. Thanks