Wildcards are special characters that enable “fuzzy” text matching in supported functions. They allow matching against patterns rather than exact values.
The Three Wildcards
| Character | Name | Matches |
|---|---|---|
* | Asterisk | Zero or more characters |
? | Question mark | Any single character |
~ | Tilde | Literal wildcard character (escape) |
Use the tilde to match a literal wildcard: ~* matches a literal asterisk, ~? matches a literal question mark, and ~~ matches a literal tilde.
Examples
=COUNTIF(A1:A10, "*ing") ' matches anything ending in "ing"
=COUNTIF(A1:A10, "???") ' matches exactly 3-character strings
=COUNTIF(A1:A10, "~?") ' matches the literal character "?"
=SUMIF(A1:A10, "report*", B1:B10) ' sums where column A starts with "report"
Supported Functions
Wildcards work in text-matching contexts for: COUNTIF, COUNTIFS, SUMIF, SUMIFS, AVERAGEIF, AVERAGEIFS, MAXIFS, MINIFS, MATCH, XMATCH, SEARCH, VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, XLOOKUP.
Important Limitation
Wildcards only work with text, not numbers. To match numeric values with conditions, use comparison operators (>, <, =) instead.
Comparison with Excel
Wildcard behavior is identical in Google Sheets and Excel. The same three characters (*, ?, ~) apply in both, and they work in the same set of functions.
See Also
- SEARCH — case-insensitive substring matching (also accepts wildcards).
- REGEXMATCH — full regular expression matching as an alternative to wildcards.
- COUNTIF — most common context for wildcard usage.