Is there a way to get ls to use wildcards ?

ls *.txt

It's the job of your shell to expand wildcards and pass the resulting list to the invoked command. Very few programs other than shells handle wildcard expansion ("globbing").

Okey dokey.

That works for me, what issues are you seeing?

That actually works.

I meant ls*.*

That works too, on my system, returning all files with a dot inside the name. To list everything, including hidden files, if that's what you need it's "ls -a".

SOLVED

I have a Windows background.

And *.* means any and every file.

Apologies to be a little picky but that's not strictly speaking true. The pattern "*.*" was commonly used to represent "all files, but not directories" and was principally used to delete the file contents of a directory with "del *.*". To delete everything, however, a simple "del *" would work -- the dot is specifically used to exclude directories because all files had extensions "back in the day". It's a fairly common misconception but worth noting especially in the light of PowerShell and the reduced need for file extensions in modern Windows versions.
The ls command doesn't have an option to just show files, that I know of, but the find command can be used instead.

Display or list only files in Unix

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Thanks, nice little tip.

Your welcome.