the access vba threads are locked so this is the next best place.

I have written code in VBA using ADODB to modify Access tables (not unusual in itself). Is there any good reason why ADODB does not recognise '*' as a wildcard character?
I found that '%' seems to work the way '*' should???
Its lucky i dont need to do much in the way of character wildcards because if '%' = '*' then what equals '%' ie how do you specify a wildcard character (alphanumeric)

I hope that makes sense.

% is the wildcard for ADODB, * is for Jet. If you wanted to use *, you would have to use DAO not ADO. I don't fully understand the rest of your question though...

Thanks for the clarification on the wildcard conventions.

The second question (written overly convoluted-apologies) was simply:
what is the single character wildcard for ADO?

Like i should have done in the beginning i did a search and found that the MSDN site had this to say about wildcards differences between ADO and DAO (see bottom part). Anyhoo maybe this will be of help to someone else.

"*******The ADO monkey wrench*********
Though Access supports SQL statements, Access SQL doesn't completely adhere to ANSI SQL standards. In Access 97, Access SQL most closely resembles the SQL-89 standard. However, with the release of Jet 4.0 in Access 2000, Access SQL was updated to more closely emulate the SQL-92 standard through syntax exposed by ADO and the Microsoft Jet OLE DB Provider. This impacts many aspects of using SQL statements in code, one of which is wildcard behavior. The pattern-matching characters we looked at last month were provided through DAO. Rather than using the asterisk (*) and question mark (?) symbols as wildcards, ADO requires that you use the percent sign (%) to match multiple characters and the underscore (_) to match a single character. There's no single-digit wildcard available through ADO that equates to DAO's pound sign wildcard (#); however, character lists and ranges behave the same."