Ignoring Regex characters in Excel

I've been given a bunch of data to search through using various Excel functions, however many, many of these values contain traditionally regex characters, such as *, in a literal sense, which means that I can't do any meaningful search of the data because it keeps returning values as if the * was a wildcard. How can I get Excel to ignore these regex characters and just reat them as normal characters? I've tried doing a find/replace for * -> \*, but that just overrode every cell with \*. Please help! PS, I need this information ASAP if at all possible :)