Excel string comparisons with escape character, using boolean, match or sumif

Question

When I was handeling a text-comparison in my database I noticed some odd behavior. In my database I want to SUM values based on a column containing strings. In this example, I want to make a group str and a group txt , with the following string values.

str     2
str1    1
str2    0
txt     1
txt1    2
tx2     3

If I would compare the text with a simpel boolean, ie =("str"="str*"), it returns False , because the * is an additional character. This makes sense in some way. However, when I used two other techniques the comparison is handled differently:

First, the following simple SUMIFS function: =SUMIFS(B:B;A:A;"str*") and =SUMIFS(B:B;A:A;"txt*") includes the values at "str" and "txt" respectively, suggesting the comparison is True .

Second, =Match("str*";{Cell containing "str"};0) returns 1, indicating that the comparison also returns True .

Why does the boolean string comparison return False , whilst MATCH and SUMIFS assume True ?

Answer 1

Only a limited number of Excel worksheet functions can use wildcard characters to filter results. Functions like COUNTIF , VLOOKUP , MATCH and others as listed here are some Excel functions that use wildcards.

Apart from the functions listed in the link, wildcard * is treated like a literal when used in the double quotes.

Answer 2

In my opinion those two functions apply the wildcard interpretation of the asterisks while your direct comparison formula with '=' takes it as just another (extra) character in the string inside the quotes, so making the two strings different.

While in the function Match(): If match_type is 0 and lookup_value is text, lookup_value can contain the wildcard characters asterisk (*) and question mark (?). An asterisk matches any sequence of characters; a question mark matches any single character.

I hope this makes sense.