Найти файл по тексту через проводник Windows 10

В Windows 10 есть поиск в проводнике, который помогает находить файлы по дате, расширению или про имени. Иногда, довольно сложно вспомнить когда был создан файл или его имя, но вы помните только часть текса в содержимом файле. И тут приходит на помощь еще один параметр для поиска — это содержимое. К сожалению, этот поиск работает только в текстовых файлах как .txt, .docs, .xlsx, .log, .pdf.

Как искать текст внутри документов в Windows 10

Откройте проводник, растяните окно по шире, нажмите сверху на вкладку «Дополнительные параметры» и установите значение для «Содержимое файлов«. Далее введите справа сверху в поиск, нужную фразу или слова, которое имеется в документе. В моем примере это «код для функции», и проводник мне выдал txt файл в котором я делал заметку.

Если Windows 10 не может найти файл по тексту, то можно включить параметр индексирования содержимого внутри файлов и перестроить индекс. Для этого:

1. Откройте «Параметры» > «Поиск» > «Поиск в Windows» > «Расширенные настройки индексатора поиска«.
2. В появившимся окне нажмите снизу на «Дополнительно«.
3. Перейдите во вкладку «Типы файлов» и установите значение на «Индексировать свойства и содержимое файлов«.
4. Нажмите OK и потребуется некоторое время, чтобы индекс перестроился.

How to Search Text in Multiple Word Files

Microsoft Word is the world’s most widely-used document creation and processing program, with a market share of 42%, followed by Google Docs and Microsoft PowerPoint. The main file formats of Word documents are docx and doc.

When you work with a large number of Word documents, finding specific text among them becomes quite difficult, unless you use special software. In Windows 10, you can use the capabilities of File Explorer, but searching with tool has a lot of inconveniences.

Let’s look at the top 5 options for searching text in multiple Word documents.

1. SeekFast

The easiest and most convenient tool for searching text in multiple Word files is SeekFast. With this tool, you can quickly and efficiently search for a combination of words or phrases in your documents, and the results are sorted by relevance, similar to search on Google, Bing, and other search engines.

SeekFast has a free and paid version. With the free version you can search in up to 50 files, and with the paid version up to 20,000 files at a time. The personal license for the paid version of SeekFast costs $47.

Downloading and installing SeekFast from the Download page takes only a few seconds.

You can see how to use SeekFast directly from File Explorer from the screenshot below.

The biggest advantages of the program are:

• You can search thousands of documents in just seconds.
• You can search for combinations of words that are not next to each other in the text, similar to search engines.
• The most relevant results are displayed first.
• You can see all documents and sentences that contain the searched words.
• You can view the text of the document without opening the file itself by clicking on the sentence in the results list.
• You can open the document with one click.
• You can start SeekFast directly from File Explorer
• It supports all widely used document types, including MS Word, Excel, PDF, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, LaTeX, RTF, and text files.
• It supports files of all popular programming languages ​​such as C, C ++, C #, Java, PHP, Python, Perl, JavaScript, and many more.

Disadvantages of SeekFast:

• In the free version you can search in up to 50 files at a time (up to 20,000 files in the paid version).

2. File Explorer

File Explorer is the built-in Windows program for working with files. The File Explorer search engine is primarily designed to search in file and folder names, and the search in texts of the documents is limited to certain file types and must be set up in the settings.

To make the necessary settings to search in the text of the files, follow these steps:

1. Open the folder you want to search in File Explorer, select the View menu and click the Options button

2. In the window that opens, click on the Search tab, select “Always search file names and contents” and click “OK”

After adjusting this setting, Windows will start indexing the texts of the documents in the folder you selected and its subfolders. When the indexing is complete, you will be able to search by typing the search words in the upper right corner of File Explorer.

Keep in mind that searching the contents of your Word documents with File Explorer is at a very basic level and has some drawbacks:

• You do not see the text found.
• You cannot search for combinations of words.
• You cannot sort the results by relevance.
• The search is very slow when you have a large number of files.

3. PowerGrep

PowerGrep is a popular document search program developed by the Thai company Just Great Software. As the name of the program itself suggests, it has features similar to the grep command in Linux. This means that along with searching by words and phrases, you can also use regular expressions. PowerGrep supports various document types such as Word, Excel, PDF, OpenOffice, and more.

PowerGrep does not have a free version. A license to use the program costs about $170 (139 EUR).

The most significant advantages of the program are:

• You can use regular expressions.
• You see the sentences containing the searched words.
• Wide range of search options.

Disadvantages of the program include:

• No free version.
• You cannot search for combinations of words.
• Complex interface.
• Slow search in folders with large number of files.
• You cannot open the files directly from the results screen.
• You cannot see the context of the sentences found.

4. Agent Ransack

One of the oldest tools for searching text in documents is Agent Ransack, created in 2000 by the British company Mythicsoft. The program supports office documents such as Word, Excel, and OpenOffice. There is a free Lite version with limited functionality and a paid version. A standard license for the paid version costs $60.

Advantages of Agent Ransack:

• Simple and easy to use interface.
• There is a free version.
• Supports regular and Boolean expressions.
• Displays sentences containing the searched words.

The main disadvantages are:

• Does not support word combinations – you can only search for single words.
• Searching is slow and time consuming for folders with many files.
• You must click on each file in the result windows to see the sentences containing the searched words.

5. DocFetcher

The last alternative we will introduce is DocFetcher – a free open source program that also has a paid version – DocFetcher Pro. This tool also has different filters – you can search by file format, maximum or minimum document size, and location.

Although it has a large set of customizations, DocFetcher is similar to File Explorer.

Search Text Files Content With Findstr Command In Windows

Windows provides findstr tool to search file contents. These file contents expected to be text and string but binary binary files are accepted too. But searching binary files and content will not give good results. In this tutorial we will look different usage types of the findstr command. Keep in mind that this is different than Windows find command which can be found following tutorial.

Help about findstr command can be get with /? option.

Help

Syntax

Syntax of the findstr command is like below.

Search String In A File

The most basic usage of findstr searching a term in a file. This search will use default options where we will look them next steps. In this example we will only provide the string and file name. In this example we will search ismail in file users.txt

Search String In A File

As we can see we provided the search term or string in double quotes to prevents errors and misuses.

Ignore Case

While searching terms the default behaviour is case sensitive. Case sensitive means all provided string upper and lower cases are searched according to their cases and no case change will be made. We can change this behaviour according to our needs and search terms in case sensitive so given search term will match all cases accordingly.

In this example we will search for ISMAIL in a in case sensitive option.

Search Multiple Strings

In previous example we have provided single term to search. In some situations we may need to search multiple terms. We can provide multiple strings to findstr command to search. All given strings will be like OR. In this example we will search terms ismail , john .

Search Multiple Strings

Use Regular Expression

Regular expressions are used to specify the structure of the string not the whole characters of the string. We can express a string start and end characters. These regex expressions can be used with findstr command. In this example we will search a string which starts with j and ends with n . We will enable regular expression search /R .

Use Regular Expression

Search In Multiple Files

Up to now we have searched terms in a single files. Searching single file is not efficient in most situations. Findstr provides the feature to search multiple files. In order to search multiple files we can use * . If we want to search only text files we can also provide extension like *.txt like below.

Search In Multiple Files

Search In Multiple Files Recursively

In previous example we have searched all files in current working directory. But there is an options where we will search in all current working directories and sub directories too. We can this as recursive search. We will search for a recursively in this example.

Search In Multiple Files Recursively

Search At The Beginning Of Line

We can search a term or string at the end of the lines. We will use /B options to search begging of the line. In this example we will search is at the beginning of the line.

Search At The End Of Line

Another way to search file is searching at the end of the file. We will use /E option to search at the end of the file.

Print Line Numbers

Another useful feature of the findstr is printing line numbers with the results. This will give hint about the matched string line number. We can print line number of the matched string with /N option like below.

Print Line Numbers

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How to Search File Contents in Windows

Windows 10 search is better than ever. Try these tips and third-party tools if you want to have a better search experience.

It can be hard to keep track of all the data on your computer, which is why the built-in Windows search function can come in so handy. But have you ever found it doesn’t always turn up the result you want?

This might be because you’re trying to search text inside a file. By default, Windows won’t look at the internals of every single file when performing your search. However, there is a way to enable this.

Not only can the Windows search be improved, but there are third-party programs that might offer you better search experiences and we’ll cover these too.

Search File Contents Using Windows Search

Windows 10 is better at searching for files and folders than it’s older versions. It’s usually great at finding the file you need. However, there might be an occasion where the file you seek doesn’t come up.

This is because, by default, Windows search doesn’t look at the contents of every file type, nor does it scan files that haven’t been indexed. Here’s how to change both of those things.

About the Windows File Index

The Windows index catalogs information about your files, like the metadata and the words within them. This allows your computer to find things quicker—it doesn’t have to scan each file individually, but can instead look in the index.

Many apps on your system use the index. File Explorer is the obvious place, but Photos, Groove, Outlook, and Cortana all use the index too.

The index updates automatically as the files on your computer change. It will take up roughly less than 10 percent of the size of the indexed files (so 100 MB of files will have an index of less than 10 MB).

While these methods will make your file search more useful, it’s worth noting that they can slow down the speed at which you’ll get your results. The more file types that have their contents indexed and the more folders searched, the longer it’ll take. If you notice a significant slowdown then it might be worth cutting back on your indexing and only enabling the more obscure searches when necessary.

1. Change General Search Options

There are a couple of general options that you can change to enhance the file index and search.

Indexing Options

First, we’ll look at how to change some system-wide indexing options.

Open the Start menu, search for Indexing Options, and select the result. In the window that opens, click Advanced and remain on the Index Settings tab.

Beneath the File Settings heading, you can enable two options:

1. Index encrypted files
2. Treat similar words with diacritics as different words

The first will add encrypted files to the index. Encryption can help protect your files, so you may not want these indexed.

The second refers to diacritics, which are also known as accents. Those are the little symbols or glyphs that appear on some words like café. Once you enable this, «cafe» and «café» would be treated as different words. This option is useful if you have many files in different languages.

Once done, click OK to save your changes.

File Explorer Options

Next, we’ll change how search operates within File Explorer.

Open the Start menu, search for Change search options for files and folders, and select the result.

Here you can enable options for when searching non-indexed locations. These are:

1. Include system directories (enabled by default)
2. Include compressed files (ZIP, CAB, etc.)
3. Always search file names and contents (this might take several minutes)

Choose what you want to enable, but the third is crucial if you want a thorough search of files and their contents.

Once done, click OK to save your changes.

2. Search For and Inside More Locations

Windows indexes locations like your Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos by default. If you like, you can add more locations to the index.

To do this, open the Start menu, search for Indexing Options, and select the result. This will open a window that shows you all the current indexed locations.

To add something to this list, click Modify > Show all locations. Use the Change selected locations section at the top—click the arrow to expand a drive or folder, then place a tick in the box to index it. Once done, click OK.

3. Search Inside More File Types

By default, Windows only adds the file contents of certain file types to the index.

To change this, we again need to use the Indexing Options section. Click Advanced and switch to the File Types tab. Here you will find a list of most file types on your system, right down to the really obscure ones. If a file type isn’t listed, input it in the Add new extension to list text field and click Add.

If you click a common file extension from the list, like doc, look beneath the How should this file be indexed? section. You’ll notice that the file is indexed with the Index Properties and File Contents option. This means that Windows search will look inside DOC files, and other file types marked like this, when you make a search.

Select a more obscure file type and it’ll likely just be set to Index Properties Only, which refers to metadata like the file name rather than anything inside it.

If you know what the file type is that you’re after, find it on the list and switch it so that it’s set to Index Properties and File Contents. Once done, click OK.

Search File Contents Using Third-Party Programs

We’ve rounded up a list of Windows search alternatives in the past, but these don’t specifically search file contents. If the Windows search isn’t for you then you can use a third-party tool called Agent Ransack. This isn’t the only program available, but it’s potentially the best due to its system compatibility, list of features, and lack of a price tag.

Agent Ransack comes from Mythicsoft and is a free alternative to their FileLocator Pro program. You can search your entire system for content text and you can also specify parameters like file size and date modified. It has an incredibly simple and easy to use interface, which is quite possibly easier to navigate than the actual Windows search.

The tool will tell you exactly which line your search keyword appears within a file (along with how many times it’s contained within) and it’ll give you the file search results super quickly. Of course, if you’re searching your entire system then it might take a while, but you can narrow down to folder searches if you need to cut out some excess.

Shortcuts and Tips for Windows Search

These methods will help you search your system thoroughly, allowing you to dig deep through masses of data and scout out that specific file that you need. Whether you prefer the built-in Windows search or a third-party alternative, both will get the job done well.

If you want to get better at using Windows search and quickly find the file you need, check out our Windows 10 search cheat sheet full of tips and shortcuts.

Here’s how to screen record on iPhone with the built-in screen recording tool, as well as some great third-party apps.

Joe was born with a keyboard in his hands and immediately started writing about technology. He has a BA (Hons) in Business and is now a full-time freelance writer who enjoys making tech simple for everyone.

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