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  • 3 weeks ago
Learn how to remove asterisks in Excel, or how to find and replace asterisks in Excel. Alternatively, how do I search for an asterisk in text in Excel, and how do I remove an asterisk from text? This question can also be extended by asking how do I remove all asterisks characters from cells in Excel?

Here are the steps outlined on the video.

Remove asterisks from cells
1) Ctrl + H
2) ~*
3) Repalce All
4) Close

In Microsoft Excel, there are certain special characters that you cannot use directly in the "Find and Replace" dialog. These characters have special meanings or functions within Excel and, if used improperly, could lead to unexpected results. Here is a list of the special characters you should avoid using in the "Find and Replace" feature.
1) Asterisk (*): Used as a wildcard to represent any sequence of characters.
2) Question mark (?): Used as a wildcard to represent a single character.
3) Tilde (~): Used as an escape character to find literal occurrences of asterisk (*) and question mark (?). For example, to find "*" or "~?", you would use this character before the asterisk or question mark.
4) Left brace ({) and right brace (}): Used in combination with the curly braces to create arrays or define specific array elements (e.g., {1, 2, 3}).
5) Left bracket ([) and right bracket (]): Reserved for referencing cells in other workbooks or sheets (e.g., '[Workbook]Sheet'!$A$1).
6) Caret (^): Used as a marker for absolute references in structured references for tables.
7) Plus sign (+): Used in formulas for addition operations.
8) Minus sign (-): Used in formulas for subtraction operations.
9) Equal sign (=): Used to start formulas in Excel.
10) Ampersand (&): Used to concatenate text or values in formulas.
11) Greater than (>), less than (=), less than or equal to (
Transcript
00:00How do you replace asterisks and question mark in your Excel? That's an interesting question
00:03someone recently asked me. Consider this data set table here. You have asterisks and question mark
00:08in your data set here. To replace, you press control H to open up find and replace and you
00:12put asterisks here and replace with blank and replace all. You can see it wipes out everything
00:17on your data set table here, including the header as well. I'm going to undo this guy here. Let's
00:21say if you try question mark and replace all, you can see it replace everything and wipes everything
00:26off. That's not what we really want. Let me undo this guy here. So to replace question mark,
00:32you're going to have to put a tilde here in front. What tilde does is basically treats the question
00:36mark as a literal character. So if you replace all, you can see that it only replaces the question
00:41mark on your sheet here. Likewise, if you do asterisks here like this, replace all, it treats
00:46the asterisks as a literal character and replace only asterisks. What if you have to replace tilde
00:52itself? Again, do a tilde, tilde like this and replace all and you will replace only the tilde.
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