Wildcards

Using Wildcards in formulas to match certain cells.

Wildcard patterns can be used with several formula functions, including MATCH (with a match_modeof 0) and XLOOKUP(with match_mode of 2). They can also be used in criteria with any equality-based comparison (=, ==, <>, !=, or no operator)

In wildcards, the special symbols ? and * can be used to match certain text patterns: ? matches any single character and * matches any sequence of zero or more characters. For example, DEFEN?E matches the strings "defence" and "defense", but not "defenestrate". *ATE matches the strings "ate", "inflate", and "late", but not "wait". Multiple ? and * are also allowed.

To match a literal ? or *, prefix it with a tilde ~: for example, COUNTIF(A1:A10, "HELLO~?") matches only the string "Hello?" (and uppercase/lowercase variants).

To match a literal tilde ~ in a string with ? or *, replace it with a double tilde ~~. For example, COUNTIF(A1:A10, "HELLO ~~?") matches the strings "hello ~Q", "hello ~R", etc. If the string does not contain any ? or *, then tildes do not need to be escaped.