Excel Weekly Challenge: COUNTIFS with Wildcards

This week's challenge is a short one: count the number of projects that contain FF2W and projects that end with W. (And do not use your finger to point at the screen and count. 😁)

The Case for Wildcards

Using wildcards in Excel formulas is helpful for several reasons. One main reason is the avoidance of clutter in the form of helper columns, excessive formulas, or intermediate steps in hidden cells or hidden sheets.

Let's say FF2W represents a system that's being installed and we want info about just this one system. There are several ways to extract this data from the entire project code and get a count. But that's more formulas and more moving parts that can break. That's more stuff to find a place for in the workbook.

Familiarity with wildcards can keep your work simple and streamlined. Moreover, wildcards can be used in auto-filter, conditional formatting, Find/Replace, and other Excel functions like: VLOOKUP, SUMIFS, SEARCH, and MATCH.

INVITATION: Make your own data (or use mine) and play with other wildcards

Below is a list of other wildcards that can be used in Excel, with examples, and a list of "Catch of the Day" menu items. (Download the workbooks. Both the Weekly Challenge and the bonus content with the answers.)

EXPLORE!

You can find Oz at:

LinkedIn

List of Courses by Oz du Soleil in the LinkedIn Learning Library

OzduSoleil.com