Excel Wildcard Quirk Solved

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Last week I wrote about using less than and greater than operators with letters like this:

=COUNTIF(grade,"<B*")

Here’s the post.

Whilst playing around with different formulas I noticed that wildcards were not behaving as I would expect.

For example using the data below with cells A2:A13 named ‘grade’:

Formula:

=COUNTIF(grade,"<B")

=2 which is counting the two A grades.

And this formula:

=COUNTIF(grade,"<B*")

=6 which is counting the A and B grades.

But this formula:

=COUNTIF(grade,">B*")

=6 which is the two C grades + two D grades + two E grades, but it doesn’t include the four B grades.

I was puzzled because with less than =COUNTIF(grade,"<B*") it included B grades, but with greater than =COUNTIF(grade,">B*") it didn’t include B grades.

The wildcard didn’t seem to be working consistently.

And the reason is this; sometimes¹ when we use greater than or less than operators to test strings the asterisk is not considered a wildcard, it’s simply text, and as text it has a character value of 42.

We can see its character value in the Insert Symbol dialog box:

We can also see that B has a character value of 66:

These examples best illustrate what is happening behind the scenes:

Note: Excel is testing the first character value, then the second character value and so on. It isn’t giving B* a value of 6,642 (six thousand, six hundred and forty-two).

1.Earlier I said "sometimes when we use greater than or less than operators to test strings the asterisk is not considered a wildcard", asterisks used like this; =COUNTIF(grade,"<>B*") where <> is not equal to, or this; =COUNTIF(grade,"=B*") are treated as wildcards.

It’s only with these operator arrangements that the asterisk is treated as text:

>=

<=

>

<

A big thank you to Roberto Mensa for explaining this quirk.

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