In Excel, when I try to replace all "?" with ".", it replaces ALL cells with ".", not just "?"

Question

e.g.,
Here's a scaled down version of the dataset:
? 1 2 3
1 ? 1 2
I replace the "?'s" with "." and select to replace all. This is what it does:
. . . .
. . . .
I've succesfully replaced all with letters (e.g., I've tried replacing "g" with "f") and it only replaces the g's with f's, why does it not work properly with punctuation marks (in my case question marks and periods)?
How can I get to to work properly.

Answer 1

It is because the ? symbol is a wildcard that means "any character" (where as * means any combination of characters.)

replace ~? instead of just ? to find the literal ? character.

Answer 2

Anthony is right on the money. In Excel the question mark is used as a wildcard character to replace any one single character. Add a tilda character (~) before the questionmark and it will treat the questionmark as a regular questionmark. The same also applies if you are trying to filter a list. I came across this when I was trying to filter a list by showing all of the rows that had an entry in Column A that begin with an asterisk (*). It didn't select what I wanted it to select and when I read up on it I found that I had to add a tilda in front of the asterisk to filter the list to ones that started with an asterisk since the asterisk is also a wildcard character.