Explanation: The two common wildcard characters that Excel recognizes are the asterisk (*) and the question mark (?). Asterisk (): The asterisk is used as a wildcard to represent any number of characters. It can be used within a text string or as part of a search criteria in functions like COUNTIF or SUMIF. For example, if you have a list of names and want to find all names starting with "J", you can use the formula =COUNTIF(A:A, "J") to count the occurrences. Question Mark (?): The question mark is used as a wildcard to represent a single character. It can be used within a text string or as part of a search criteria. For example, if you have a list of words and want to find all four-letter words starting with "A", you can use the formula =COUNTIF(A:A, "A???") to count the occurrences. These wildcard characters provide flexibility in searching and matching text patterns in Excel.