A while ago I had to normalize values in an Excel sheet where some of the values contained an asterisk (*) and some did not. However it's not immediately clear how to search for a asterisk. It turns out the escape character is a tilde so searching for ~* is the correct way to do this.
[caption id="attachment_247" align="alignleft" width="300"]
Searching for ~* to search for an asterisk in excel[/caption]