Can i use wildcards in vlookup

The difficulty: The check number was embedded inside a Transaction Code field. The field she needed to search contained a variable number of characters as a prefix, followed by the check number, then ending with even more characters. What if you actually have to look for an asterisk or a question mark?

Using these three characters are particularly difficult if you have hundreds of VLOOKUPs and the values already contain wildcard characters. It would actually be better if Microsoft offered an option that turned off the wildcard behavior for a particular worksheet or workbook. Article by Jeevan A Y. Please select the batch. Cookies help us provide, protect and improve our products and services. By using our website, you agree to our use of cookies Privacy Policy.

Why are Excel formulas not calculating? VBA to sort sheets alphabetically. Office Scripts — Sort sheets alphabetically. Use Office Scripts with Power Automate. Office Scripts — Hide all sheets except one. VBA to hide all sheets except one. Office Scripts — Reverse number signs. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Consider the following table for example. Assuming you want to look up an employee name Kevin Ashton to retrieve his salary. You can also use the question mark?

For example, a search for Ke? To follow along, you can download the example file here. The wildcard is a symbol used for advanced searching. There are three different types of wildcards. They stand in for any character or characters in a search term. If the data you are searching through has a word like a reporter as in the data above, it will be spotted. I am convinced that you now understand how the various wildcard characters work in Excel. Looking at the worksheet above, the formula made an attempt to find an employee by the first name Chase in order to retrieve his salary.

However, the formula returned an error. This error is because there is no employee by the name Chase. Even though there is Chase Riley on the list, it is not the same as your search term. So, to search for employees using their first names only, you need to specify that in your formula. It is also possible to search for names or words that begin with a particular character or characters.