I have hundreds & hundreds of Microsoft Office documents saved on my
computer.  I feel as though they are organized & namedrelatively well,
but I still find it difficult to track down a document that I need,
especially if it is older.  I know that I can search in Windows XP for
the names of the files, but is there any way to search through the
text of the documents themselves to find particular key words?  In
other words, if I wanted to find a document on budget, I could type in
"budget" and that would narrow it down to all of the files that have the
word budget in the text or name of the file.  With any luck, it could
also work on entire phrases or sentences.  And of course, it would be
nice if it was free!

Thanks!

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Request for Question Clarification by robertskelton-ga on 24 Mar 2004 11:35 PST

Windows XP allows for searching for file names AND finding a word or
phrase in a file. Just click on "Search" in the start menu.

If this is not suitable, let us know what other features you require.

tnsdan...

As robertskelton-ga notes, this can be accomplished with the
native search function in Windows XP.

Assuming your documents are primarily organized under the 
'My Documents' folder, you can proceed as follows:

1) Click on Start -> Documents - My Documents (or navigate
to that folder however it is set up in your Start Menu).

2) Right-click on My Documents and select Open.

3) In the menu bar of the resulting window, click Folders.
You will now have a double-paned Explorer window open,
with the 'My Documents' folder highlighted in the left pane.

4) Right-click on the highlighted 'My Documents' folder, and
select 'Search' from the resulting menu.

Note:
If the file you seek might be located outside of the My Documents
folder, you can click on 'My Computer' in the left window pane
to expand it and select an entire drive, such as the C drive,
in which to conduct the search - though this will work more
quickly and efficiently if you organize *all* your pertinent
files under 'My Documents'. Otherwise you will be searching
through very large and irrelevant system files before locating
the desired file.

5) In the resulting search window, in the box titled
'Search for files and folders named:', type '*.*'
without quotes. This is a wildcard symbol, meaning 'all
files and folders'. If you were certain it was a file
with an MS Word 'doc' extension, you could enter '*.doc'
instead. The format is 'filename.extension'.

6) In the box below, titled 'Containing text', enter the
word or exact phrase that you are seeking. Exact phrases
can be located, but they must be exact. For instance, you
can search for an email address contained in the document,
and the results will include all documents with that email
address. Do not use quotes around the phrase.

7) Click on the 'Search Now' button, or hit the Enter key.

All files or folders containing your keyword or exact phrase
will be shown in the window to the right, and can be opened
from there.

I didn't need to search for this answer, since I personally
use this function all the time.


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the answer cannot be improved upon by way of a dialog  
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sublime1-ga

Perfect.  Thank you!

Hi!
First of all Window XP has this facilty wherein you can also include
the word/phrase in the document as one of the search criteria. this is
present under the advance options , there are other options also like
, size of the file, modification etc.
If you know the folder where your doc is you can just right click on
the folder and select search, this way your search will be made in
this folder only.

hope this helps
Shamz