Wildcard characters returned by MS-Query

Good morning all.
When I retrieve data from our Oracle database in Excel, using MS-Query, I get a lot of wildcard characters in the text fields. This is because the text is stored in Oracle as rich text. How do I retrieve the data without wildcard characters? Alternatively, how do I get rid of it in Excel? Is there a formula that can be used? The find and replace function is not effective.