Wild characters don't work

Several employees are using Excel to convert many exams which happen to export with HTML code:

<font face="Verdana" size="3">Which country is not on the Malaria list? <font color="#999999" size="2"><em>(SP20)</em></font></font>

To eliminate the code, we simply Find <*> and replace it with a null field. This has been working great except one user always receives the following error message:

We couldn't find anything to replace. Click options for more ways to search.

FYI: It's possible the data you're trying to replace is in a protected sheet. Excel can't replace protected sheets.

We are very experienced Excel users and this is not a protected sheet. This user can make changes, save the doc, etc. We have also compared all settings in the find/replace tool and this user is doing nothing different than the rest of us. Also, any one of us can open the same file and perform the same replace function with perfect results.

Any ideas?