* causing problems with finding duplicates with conditional format

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Michele - DARCC - 26 Mar 2008 14:36 GMT

I'm using conditional formatting to highlight duplicates in EXCEL 2007. The
column I need to locate duplicates in has '*' in it. As a result it is
considering the following to be duplicates.

2284Hill*9
2284Hill*89

Is there any way to tell EXCEL not to interpret the * as a universal
character in either 'COUNTIF' or conditional formating OR in a Find/Replace
so I can change it to something else?

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Pete_UK - 26 Mar 2008 15:49 GMT

In Find/Replace you can specify:

Find what: ~*
Replace with: _ (for example)
click Replace All

The tilde symbol ~ tells Excel to treat the * as a normal character
and not a wildcard character. In this example the * would be replaced
with an underscore.

Hope this helps.

Pete

On Mar 26, 1:36 pm, Michele - DARCC <Michele -
DA...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

> I'm using conditional formatting to highlight duplicates in EXCEL 2007. The
> column I need to locate duplicates in has '*' in it. As a result it is
[quoted text clipped - 6 lines]
> character in either 'COUNTIF' or conditional formating OR in a Find/Replace
> so I can change it to something else?

Reply to this Message