I have used a macro to remove duplicate items from a list in excel. This left (amongst thousands of others) the following two pieces of text in 2 rows;

BALLOON & INFLATION BULB: HERNIA REPAIR;KIDNEY DIST;(TYCO #999)
BALLOON & INFLATION BULB:* HERNIA REPAIR;KIDNEY DIST;(TYCO #999)

It left these because of the * (I am assuming)

The problem I have now is - if I run a =sumif() across this data, the '*' acts as a wildcard and treats the two rows as being identical. We are unable to edit these descriptions and the spreadsheet is built using macros and many other similar instances can easily happen.

Qu. 1 is there a way of negating the '*' in the setting of Excel?
Qu. 2 is there another way to run the =sumif so that these lines are CORRECTLY treated as being different?

thanks for your help

regards
Quinn