Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Using Find and Replace and Wildcards in Excel”.
In this Excel tutorial, I will show you how to use the find and replace feature in Excel to locate data in your spreadsheet. So here I have a spreadsheet of movie titles and some information about those movies. But let’s say I want to quickly check to see if I’ve included a specific movie. All I have to do is hold the ctrl key and tap F and it brings up, Find and Replace. Let’S look first at find so with the find tab selected. I can just type in what I’m trying to locate. Let’S say the movie Dark Knight after typing it in, I can just tap, enter on the keyboard or click find next and it locates that data.
Now, if that’s all, I needed just to verify that the data is there, then I’m done, but sometimes I might want to find and replace with something else. So maybe it should be titled The Dark Knight instead of just Dark Knight, I can type that in click replace and if there is more than one instance of this problem, I could just click replace all and it would fix all of them. I click OK. So that’s a great time-saver if you’ve made a spelling mistake or some other error, you can have Excel, find all instances of that error and replace them with the correct data.
Now, what happens if you know that you’re looking for something, but you don’t know exactly what that is you’re, not quite sure what mistake you made, but you know that you probably made one or let’s say you’re, looking for all data in Excel. That is similar. What you can do is you can use wildcard characters in Excel. So let’s look at the wildcard symbols, we have the question mark and we have the asterisk. Those are the two main wildcard symbols.
So let’s say I’m looking for some movies that include the letters s T in the name, but maybe I’m not sure what comes next. So after the S T I could put in a question mark and that question mark is a wild-card, it can represent any one character. So s t followed by any character at all and followed by an are any example of that should be found when I click find next, so let’s try it out.
It found the court jester because ste are the question mark can fill in for that II. Let’S find the next one Western, it found the word Western Star Trek for and Star Wars, so each of those is found when I use this question mark wildcard because it can replace any one character. Okay, let’s try it again, but this time let’s use the asterisk wildcard, so st asterisk are the asterisk can fill in for any number of characters. So this should find any data in this spreadsheet at all that has an ST and as many characters as possible and then followed by an R. So let’s try that it found Western. It found Star Trek and Star Wars, but it also found strange brew and the court jester so it gave us an additional search result.
Strange brew, so find and replace is a very useful tool built into Excel. You can use it to find data to find and replace data, and when you need to remember to use the question mark and the asterisk, which are your wildcards to help you find data that you may not know exactly how to spell or if you’ve made spelling Mistakes, but you still want to be able to locate it thanks for watching. I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful. If you did, please click the like button below and consider connecting with me on my social media accounts like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, and definitely do subscribe to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students and when you do subscribe. Please click the bell next to the subscribe button. If you do that, you’ll be notified whenever I post another video and watch for another video from me at least every Monday, if you’d like to support my youtube channel, consider becoming a patron of mine through my patreon account and you’ll find a link to that in The description below .