Excel: Why can't you search on tildes?

This doesn’t come up very often, but sometimes I need to delete tiles (~) in a file. But Find won’t find them. Why?

type a double tilde in the search box

Oh wait - you want to know why too -

The tilde is used to indicate that the next character is a literal.

so if you wanted to remove other special characters like * or ? you would put a tilde in front of them in the search box ~? or ~*.

Yep. The tilde is used as a wildcard to signify “no, really, find the next thing after this tilde”, so you can search for what would otherwise be a wildcard, such as a question mark, asterisk, or, in this case, a tilde.

I’ll try that next time. (This time I inserted a column and did text-to-columns.)

Use ~~ to find tildes, ~? to find question marks, etc.

D’oh! Too late.

Ethilrist: Thanks for that. (And you, BubbaDog.) A lot of data has asterisks in it and they’re a small pain. (I’ve been doing the insert and text-to-columns thing.) I’m sure I’ll have the opportunity to try the ~* soon.