How do I count wildcard characters using Excel COUNTIF?

excel worksheet-function countif
Paul Ellery picture Paul Ellery · Aug 26, 2009 · Viewed 7k times · Source

How do I count the number of cells that contain the string "A*" - without treating the star as a wildcard character?

Answer

Will Bickford picture Will Bickford · Aug 26, 2009

Quoted directly from Excel help documents: "If you want to find an actual question mark or asterisk, type a tilde (~) before the character."

COUNTIF(A1:A4,"A~*")

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