When you search for information, you can use the wildcard character to find items that contain your specified sequence of characters and that may contain additional, unspecified characters.
By default, the wildcard character is an asterisk (*), but you can change it. You would especially want to do this if you want to use the asterisk as an actual data character in fields.
You can use wildcard characters when you:
NOTE: Not all fields support the use of the wildcard character as might be expected. This is especially true of fields that automatically expand a field to a required number of characters. This functionality is commonly seen in order and ID number fields. In these cases, you might have to place the wildcard both before and after your search characters.
The wildcard behaves slightly differently, depending on the context in which you are using it.
In a text search, the wildcard represents zero or more possible missing alphanumeric characters.
Note that text wildcard searches are not case-sensitive, so this search would return all items beginning with the letter A, for example, Anthony and automobile.
In a date search, the wildcard character matches the month, day of the month, or year.
NOTE: The wildcard character stands for the entire specification for a month, a day, or a year; you cannot use the wildcard in a combination such as 200* to return all years from 2000 to 2009 or in a day specification such as 2* to return all days of a month from 20 to 29.
If you want to enter the asterisk as actual data in a field, you must change the wildcard character.
On the Run Time tab, in the Behavior group, the Wildcard character field, enter the new character you want to use as the wildcard character.
It is best to use a character that you are not likely ever to need in a data field. Good possible candidates include the tilde character (~), the circumflex character (^), and the grave accent character (`).
Finding Records Using a Query Form
Finding Records with Filter-in-Place