“Of Mice and Megabytes Supplement”

SEARCHING FILES FOR PHRASES OR WORDS
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Occasionally, I have a need to find a specific phrase or word buried somewhere in one of the hundreds (if not thousands) of documents saved on my hard drive. These are usually reports or correspondence I’ve created in Word or Excel. Luckily, both Word and Excel have a little known but handy search tool for turning this chore into a cakewalk.

As an example, let’s suppose I need to find all Word documents containing the word “ichiban.”

  1. Open Word (Windows version)
  2. Click File, then Open.
  3. In the upper right corner, locate, then click on, the menu option Tools, then click Find.
  4. The dialogue box that appears (titled Find) offers numerous options and parameters for our search. For our example, locate the drop down box titled Property located in the bottom left. It probably reads File Name but we want to do a search on the documents’ content, so click on the little arrow to the right. In the resulting drop down box, choose Contents.
  5. In the box to the right of Property, make sure Condition displays Include Words.
  6. Further to the right, is a box titled Value. Place your cursor in the blank field, and type ichiban.
  7. Click the Add to List button directly above the typed word ichiban.
  8. We need to let Word know the folder location in which to search. The default value is C:\My Documents. This should suffice for most searches because Word, by default, stores saved documents in this folder. But to be on the safe side, click on the small, white box titled Search Subfolders.
  9. We could save these search parameters for later use, but since this is a one-time only search (hopefully), then let’s forego this option. Click Find Now.
  10. While displaying a window named Open, Word searches through documents containing the word ichiban. If such documents do exist, the files names, folder location, and creation date will show up. If no documents can be found, only folders will be displayed, and nothing highlighted.
  11. For our example, the found file is highlighted. Click the Open button, and Word will display the document.

This search function is very powerful since you dictate the conditional requirements at the Find screen. Do you want to match the word exactly (i.e., a search for ICHIBAN won’t return the same results as Ichiban). Do you want one word OR another, or ALL words? Are you looking for a file NAME or file CONTENTS?

As a test, try searching for a document with known contents, or create your own test document. Here’s a nifty search tidbit. If you’re unsure of how the entire word is spelled, use the asterisk after part of the word, such as ichi*. In essence, you’re looking for any word that starts with the letters ichi but could end with any other combination of letters or even numbers.

Re-printed from the Rafu Shimpo, May 2002. Copyright©2002 Rafu Shimpo. All rights reserved.