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Searching for Special Characters in Excel

I often find that Excel files contain special characters that must be cleansed before or during processing. In the cases where the data must be cleansed in Excel, some of these characters cannot be found or replaced without using an escape character (~).

Searching for all asterisks without using the escape character returns all cells containing data.
Asterisk_01

As does searching for all question marks without using the escape character.
QuestionMark_03

However searching for all asterisks or question marks using the escape character returns only the cells containing asterisks or question marks.
Asterisk_02

QuestionMark_04

Searching for all instances of the escape character itself (tilde) without using a second escape character returns the last cell of the sheet.
Tilde_05

Searching for all tildes using a second escape character returns only the cells containing tildes.
Tilde_06

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