Find cell value begins or contains using wildcards with powershell - excel

Question

i have a trouble findiong a value in an excel sheet.
i want to get the cell number that contains a value with a string, but i need to use wildcars.
the cell that i am searching begins with B- and i am using this code:
$excel = New-Object -ComObject excel.application
$destinationPath = "C:\Users\john\Desktop\wb.xlsx"
$workbook = $excel.Workbooks.Open($destinationPath)
$sheet1 = $workbook.WorkSheets.item("Sheet1")
$sheet1.activate()
$range = $sheet1.Range("A:A").EntireColumn
$s = $range.find("B-")
write-host "Range found: " $s.address().tostring()
this returns me the first cell that contains B- .... but i need to know the first cell that begins with this. So i think i must use wildcards but i don't know how.
please, could anyone help me to achieve this??
thank you!! BR.

Answer 1

Here a working solution which is able to use regex as well:
Add-Type -AssemblyName Microsoft.Office.Interop.Excel
$excel = New-Object -ComObject Excel.Application
$excel.Visible = $True
$excel.DisplayAlerts = $False
$workbook = $excel.Workbooks.Open( "C:\Users\john\Desktop\wb.xlsx", [System.Type]::Missing, $false )
$worksheet = $workbook.WorkSheets.item("Sheet1")
[void]$worksheet.activate()
$searchRange = $worksheet.Range("A:A").EntireColumn
$searchFor = '^.*B\-.*$'
$foundCell = $null
foreach( $cell in $searchRange.Cells ) {
if( $cell.Value2 -match $searchFor ) {
$foundCell = $cell
break
}
}
if( $foundCell ) {
$foundCell.Value2
}
[void]$workbook.Close()
[void]$excel.Quit()
[System.Runtime.Interopservices.Marshal]::ReleaseComObject($excel) | Out-Null