Hello and welcome to the forum,

In Excel's find function, ? = single wildcard... in other words 'Everything'. What you were trying to do is ~? which means a question mark.

I don't know if you can recover your file, but if you can this may be possible with file recovery software. The first I would look in is if Excel saved a temp file. Button >> Recent >> Recover unsaved workbooks.

http://office-recovery.com/excel.asp

http://www.dummies.com/how-to/conten...xcel-2007.html

Hope this helps.

abousetta