From the course: Excel Tips Weekly

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Use wildcard symbols in functions

Use wildcard symbols in functions - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Excel Tips Weekly

Use wildcard symbols in functions

- [Instructor] In Excel, we can use the asterisk symbol 2 and also the question mark symbol 3 at different times as wildcards in formulas. 4 And you might have seen a previous weekly tip 5 that shows how we can use these characters 6 in filtering and in the find and select command. 7 In this list here, it's about 700 rows or so, 8 we're interested in finding out how many people 9 work in any of our departments 10 where we have the word service. 11 So we could say, "How many people are involved 12 in some kind of service department here?" 13 We'll be using the countif function over in column K, 14 =countif. 15 We're looking at the data in column D, 16 and we're looking for the word service. 17 If you have some familiarity 18 with how to use text strings in Excel, 19 you might type "Service." 20 But pressing enter here gives us a count of zero. 21 The word service sometimes begins the entry 22 as it does in rows four and…

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