Excel has recently added three regex functions to handle text patterns, but did you know the old SEARCH function can use wildcards?
The SEARCH function returns a number that represent the starting character position number of one string within another string.
In the image below you can see the position number of the word jumps in the sentence in cell A1.
Instead of jumps you could have used j*s.
The * wildcard represents any number of characters including no characters. By no characters I means that j*s would find js as well as jets.
If you need to look for a specific number of characters you could use j???s.
The ? represents a character position. So j???s won’t find jets but it would find jokes because there are three characters between the j and s.
You can use the wildcards in combination.
Using j??p* would find both jump and jumps.
In the image below I have removed the s from jumps in the string.
Just noting that for your last two examples, the asterisks at the end are not needed (SEARCH searches for the pattern anywhere within the text automatically). One or more trailing question marks, on the other hand, does have significance… for example, if you had a single question mark at the end, then at least one arbitrary character must be located at the end of the text, two question marks would mean at least two arbitrary characters must be located at the end of the text, neither of these arbitrary characters would be part of the main pattern you are searching for.