Hello, my pretty little petals. Today I have a super quick tip for you, but one that's useful nonetheless. And that is, how do we find and replace wildcard characters in our Excel spreadsheets? Now, if that sounds like something that you want to learn, then keep watching. Now, what exactly am I talking about?
Well, let's take a look at our data. You can see here, I have a list of different European cities, and I have the current temperature or the weather for those cities for today. And this is just data that I grabbed off of the web. Now, when I grabbed this data from the web, the data imported with an asterisk next to each of these cities.
Now, I don't want that asterisk there. I want to replace it. So I could use find and replace to do this, but we do have a small problem. Let me show you what the issue is first, and then I'll show you the simple way that you can fix it. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to select all of the cities, Control, Shift, Down Arrow, my favourite shortcut.
And then to quickly jump into Find and Replace, we can press Control F or Control H. If we press Control H, it's going to jump you to the Replace tab. If you press Control F, it's going to jump you to the Find tab. That's the difference between the two. So I might think that in here, I can say, okay, I want to find the asterisk in this range, and I want to replace it with nothing.
I just want to delete it, basically. But check out what happens if I click on replace all. It removes everything from the cell. And that is because an asterisk is a wildcard character. So let's click on okay. I'm just going Undo to put all of those back because we need to go about this in a slightly different way.
Now, as I mentioned, the asterisk is a wildcard character when we're dealing with find and replace. And this wildcard character, the asterisk denotes all. So basically what it's saying here is find everything and replace it with nothing, which is why we're getting a blank cell. So, what do we do if we just want to replace the asterisk?
Well, it's a very simple case of before the asterisk, we want to add a tilde. That little wiggly dash. As soon as we do that, we can still say replace with nothing, that's fine. Click on Replace all. It just gets rid of the asterisk. And it leaves the city name there. So that little tilde trick applies whenever you want to find or replace a character that is a wildcard character in Excel.
Another example of that would be if you were trying to find and replace question marks in a range of cells, question mark is a wildcard character again, we would need to add the tilde in order to get it to work correctly.
