Not so wild lookups
In case, this is the first time you are hearing about Excel formula wildcards, check out the Using wildcards in Excel VLOOKUP formula tutorial.
So you know about wild cards like * ?, now how would you tell VLOOKUP to ignore them?
Say, you are genuinely interested in looking the value “* Payroll” in a lookup table. What then?
This is exactly the problem faced by Peter in our forum post VLOOKUP and cells with “*” NOT to be interpreted as wildcard