Wild card searches in Microsoft Access

When you are looking for a value in a table you normally want to find the exact value that you're searching for. Sometimes though, you might want to find a partial match - perhaps you're not sure whether the customer's name is "Smith" or "Smyth". Wild cards let you do this. They are special codes that will match any character in the field and they let you search for a pattern like "sm" followed by any character followed by "th".

Wild cards

Access supports two wild card characters:

? matches any single character.

* matches any number of characters - including none.

Just type these characters into the Find dialog as part of the expression you're searching for.

Examples

a?e	Matches 'are', 'database', 'A/e',
8?7	Matches '1817', '8a7', and 'B48 7PQ' - remember that a space counts as a character.
a*e	Matches 'Alvechurch', 'database', and even 'Mary had a little lamb' because * matches any number of characters - it doesn't matter how far apart the 'a' and the 'e' are.
8*7	Matches 'SER#83/3471a', '1817', and '87' because * matches any number of characters - including none.