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:

• "?"
• \?
• '?'
• ??

Answer 1

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?"

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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