Excel SEARCH and Wildcards

The SEARCH function returns a number that represent the starting character position number of one string within another string.

In the image below you can see the position number of the word jumps in the sentence in cell A1.

Instead of jumps you could have used j*s.

The wildcard represents any number of characters including no characters. By no characters I means that js would find js as well as jets.

If you need to look for a specific number of characters you could use j???s.

The ? represents a character position. So j???s won’t find jets but it would find jokes because there are three characters between the j and s.

You can use the wildcards in combination.

Using j??p* would find both jump and jumps.

In the image below I have removed the s from jumps in the string.