Counting text in a range is easy. For example, if you would like count how many times “text” is in a specified range (named data), you can write something like this:
=COUNTIF(data,"*text*")
This formula will give you the count of all the cells where Excel found “text” at any place.
But let’s say you want to count wildcard characters in a range, then you can write something like this:
=SUM(IF(NOT(ISERR(FIND("*",data))),1,0))
This formula should be entered as an array formula with Ctrl + Shift + Enter. Usually, wildcard can be “escaped” using a tilde (~), but the FIND function doesn’t understand wildcard characters like the SEARCH function does.