* and ? are wildcards for lots of excel functions (as well as the Edit|Find's).
The ~ character is the escape character that tells excel to not use them as
wildcards.
~* and ~?
And you use ~~ to tell excel not to use ~ as that escape character.
So if your data has the possibility of having *, ? or ~ in and each should not
be treated like wildcards/escape characters, then you could modify your
=vlookup() formula to something like:
=VLOOKUP(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"~","~~"),"?","~?"),"*","~*"),
Sheet2!$A:$B,2,FALSE)
If you don't care about the * and ? wildcards, you could use:
=VLOOKUP(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"~","~~"),Sheet2!$A:$B,2,FALSE)
