Hi all, I am trying to go through this spreadsheet and remove all asterisks in a particular column. For example, I want to make sure that all entries that say “APPLE*” in my spreadsheet will be replaced with “APPLE”. However, when I just search for the asterisk (*) character, Excel recognizes this as an open string instead of a char, so all my data gets wiped out. How can I make sure that when I use Find/Replace, Excel recognizes that i am looking for the asterisk character itself? Thank you
Can you do Find: APPLE* Replace with: APPLE I did it quickly in excel and it worked.
The problem is, I have multiple discrete entries with “*” at the end (APPLES*, ORANGES*, BANANAS*, ETC.), and I want to remove * from all of them. There are thousands of rows of data.
=LEFT(a1,LEN(a1)-1)
By the way, I should point out that not every data entry has an asterisk either. There are some APPLE and others APPLE*. I want both to say APPLE.
Filter the data and then do what jpm351 did - if what he says works.
Put a ~ symbol infront of your asterix and you should be good to go.
Anonymous Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Put a ~ symbol infront of your asterix and you > should be good to go. Exactly what I was looking for – thank you! I appreciate the quick response on this, guys. I have thousands of rows of customer data I need to analyze, and unfortunately the information I get from company management is not always properly formatted…so this makes my life a lot simpler. By the way, what exactly does the “~” operator do? Does it basically translate any non-chars into chars? Are there any other tricky ones other than the '*" that I have to worry about when I’m trying to do a find/replace? Many thanks again
It just tells Excel to treat the asterix as a text character instead of a wildcard. You may encounter the same issue if doing a find/replace on a “?” character - not sure.