Utility to search word files.

[Darat]

Anyone know of a good utility that allows text searching within MS Word files?

I have thousands of documents and I want to be able to do searches like "dog" AND "cat" NOT "rabbit".

[_Q_]

Originally posted by Darat
Anyone know of a good utility that allows text searching within MS Word files?

I have thousands of documents and I want to be able to do searches like "dog" AND "cat" NOT "rabbit".

I have no personal experience with the program, but you might take a look at PowerGREP (http://www.powergrep.com/). They claim to have a free trial version available for download, and a 90-day money-back guarantee if you buy the product. They also have some on-line demos.


_Q_

[Tez]

dtsearch is the only really powerful one I've come across, and I really shopped around and tried several. Its the only one that you can throw many gig at and it'll be fine.

(I use it to index all the pdf files of scientific papers - thousands of them. They give you a thirty day trial....)

[DrMatt]

MS Word, Apple Sherlock, and the Find File utility in Windows generally do a pretty good job of this themselves (you might not have known that MS Word has a fairly fancy file-search application built in--check the help).

GREP-based applications use regular expressions--see if those are suitable for your kind of search.

If you REALLy need to do a lot of free-text searching of huge amounts of text, you might want to allocate a hard drive to an implementation of Glimpse or Verity or even Google--the sorts of pre-indexed text database tools that web search engines are built on.

[Darat]

Originally posted by DrMatt
MS Word, Apple Sherlock, and the Find File utility in Windows generally do a pretty good job of this themselves (you might not have known that MS Word has a fairly fancy file-search application built in--check the help).

GREP-based applications use regular expressions--see if those are suitable for your kind of search.

If you REALLy need to do a lot of free-text searching of huge amounts of text, you might want to allocate a hard drive to an implementation of Glimpse or Verity or even Google--the sorts of pre-indexed text database tools that web search engines are built on.

I use both Windows search and the MS Word one, but I'd like a little utility that I can leave open, just jot in a few words and expressions and hey presto!

I've tried some grep apps but haven't come across one that can "read" MS Word files as anything but binary files. And I’m not quite that bothered to go down the Google style route!

I'm just lazy and spoilt and want my ideal application without having to write it myself - but thanks for the ideas kind people.

[_Q_]

Originally posted by Darat


I've tried some grep apps but haven't come across one that can "read" MS Word files as anything but binary files.

Again, I'm not being paid to shill for these folks, and I've never personally used their software, but it sounds to me as though PowerGREP is supposed to be able to handle MS Word files as something other than "just binary". From their website:

PowerGREP is capable of decoding both MS Word DOC files and Acrobat PDF files. Although these files are technically binary files, PowerGREP will decode them and search through them as if they were plain text files.

Is that the sort of functionality you seek, or am I missing something?


_Q_

[Darat]

Originally posted by _Q_


Again, I'm not being paid to shill for these folks, and I've never personally used their software, but it sounds to me as though PowerGREP is supposed to be able to handle MS Word files as something other than "just binary". From their website:



Is that the sort of functionality you seek, or am I missing something?


_Q_

I'm trying PowerGrep now and you are right it does handle MS Word format but it has an ugly interface (told you I was spoilt!) but I'll give the evaluation version a go for a while.

Just downloading dtsearch as well to have a look at that.

I am surprised, given the prevalence of MS Word, there aren't dozens of freeware and shareware search utilities available.

[Darat]

First thoughts on dtsearch - wow, about 2½ hours to index all the files I wanted it to and very nice, straight forward interface.

[Darat]

Well after using it for a short time I've decided to buy dtsearch.

It's a great program; I've indexed a hell of a lot more then just my word docs!

-ves:

Interface is OKish, bit clunky
Some options not immediately obvious
Building the index the first time takes quite awhile.

+ves:

Comprehensive
fast
FAST
FAST


Great reccomendation Tez - thanks.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Oops, I'm too late. I was going to suggest you stop using the Devil Word, Darat.

~~ Paul

[Darat]

Originally posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos
Oops, I'm too late. I was going to suggest you stop using the Devil Word, Darat.

~~ Paul

Unfortunately since Windows became dominant in the office every place I've worked has used word, so most of my docs are in a Word native format.

It was a real, real shame that WordPerfect took so long to release their first Windows version and then made such a mess of it.

WP (DOS) can still do things that are difficult to achieve in Word, for instance multiple format alignments on the same line without using tabs.