Excel Conditional Formatting Escaping a Question Mark

Question

I would like to use a conditional formatting rule in an excel file that would color any box with a question mark in it red. It seems that Excel is using a question mark as a wild card and will turn all cells with at least one character in them red. How can i escape the question mark?

These don't seem to work:

"?"
\?
'?'
??

score 116 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 25 '22 at 15:42

116

Prefix it with tilde

~?

The tilde (~) is an escape character for special and wildcard characters in Excel. You can use escape characters to provide literal representations of characters that otherwise have a special meaning. You can also use tilde (~) followed by ?, *, or ~ to find question marks, asterisks, or other tilde characters — for example, fy91~? finds "fy91?"

edited Feb 25 '22 at 15:42

Community

1

answered May 24 '10 at 21:17

Sharjeel Aziz

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Prefix with a `~` ? Seriously ? What the rofl... Does anyone have an idea *why* ? Anyway, huge thanks. I'd never have figured out such a syntax alone. – Balmipour Jun 27 '17 at 15:43

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered May 24 '10 at 21:17

4

Change the rule to "cells ending with" "?". This will color all cells with a question mark assuming it is the last character.

answered May 24 '10 at 21:17

kzh

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score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 23 '16 at 14:58

3

Also you can use Specific Text > Contains > ~? This tells excel to ignore symbol command and treats the cell as text.

answered Nov 23 '16 at 14:58

user667254

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Excel Conditional Formatting Escaping a Question Mark

3 Answers3