), asterisk(*), or tilde (~).
A question mark (?)
matches any one character and an asterisk (*) matches zero or more characters of any kind.
The tilde (~) is an escape character to matchliteralwildcards that may appear indata.
In this example, we only need to use an asterisk (*).
Notice that COUNTIF isnotcase-sensitive.
For example, to make the formula case-sensitive, we can add theEXACT function.
However, one quirk of the FIND function is that it will return a #VALUE!
This makes the formula a bit more cryptic.
Still, I do like this formula.
For example, =LEFT(“apple”,3) returns “app”.
LEN will also count characters in numbers, but number formatting is not included.
