Excel Search Tip #3: Wild Card Searches
If you are looking for any strings that contain a certain set of information, but are unsure of the exact values to search for, you can use wildcards to help your search.
Use an asterisk (*) to find any string of characters.
Use a question mark (?) to find any single character.
This is useful when searching for order numbers between a certain range. For example if your orders are numbered in a Year-Month-Order Number format (i.e. 2014-10-1234) you can search for all orders in October 2014 by entering 2014-10-* in the search field. If you wanted to search for all orders that happened in any month of 2014, you could enter 2014-??-* in the search field.
If the string you are searching for happens to contain an asterisk or question mark, you can precede the character with a tilde (~). For example if searching for a ?, you would enter ~? in the search field.