How do you use wildcards in Excel?

I don’t know about excel, but if I remember correctly Open Office uses regular expressions for it’s searches. In regular expressions __asterisk__ means “match zero or more of whatever precedes.” If you want to match any character you represent it with a ’.’, so ’.__asterisk__’ will match any number of any character. To search for something ending with “xyz” you’d use ”.__asterisk__xyz” and to match anything that had “xyz” in it you’d use ”.__asterisk__xyz.__asterisk__ ”

(It’s treating all of the asterisks as textile markup and I can’t figure out how to escape them. Please replace __asterisk__ with * when you read it.)

I hope that helps. I’m going to install it on my current computer and try it out.

It looks like when you do a search (using Open Office) you have to click the “More Options” button and select the “regular expressions” check box for it to work.

In case it wasn’t clear, to match any number of any characters you need the wildcard:
.*

You are 100% correct—I eventually got it after much googling and toil. Thank you so much.