Searching within Microsoft Office File Contents

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HungerFreeze
Posts: 44
Joined: Tue May 02, 2017 4:04 pm

Searching within Microsoft Office File Contents

Post by HungerFreeze »

Hello, Everyone,

I know that Search Everything can't search through file contents yet but is there a way to incorporate other search engines within Search Everything?

Specifically, is there a way to combine Microsoft Office's Search within file contents?

I'm assuming it's a no but just checking.
horst.epp
Posts: 1332
Joined: Fri Apr 04, 2014 3:24 pm

Re: Searching within Microsoft Office File Contents

Post by horst.epp »

HungerFreeze wrote: Sat Dec 12, 2020 3:15 pm Hello, Everyone,

I know that Search Everything can't search through file contents yet but is there a way to incorporate other search engines within Search Everything?

Specifically, is there a way to combine Microsoft Office's Search within file contents?

I'm assuming it's a no but just checking.
Everything uses any installed Office IFilters to search for content
but that doesn't beat Windows indexer which is of course much faster.
NotNull
Posts: 5167
Joined: Wed May 24, 2017 9:22 pm

Re: Searching within Microsoft Office File Contents

Post by NotNull »

Everything is able to search for file content, too.

However, this information is not in the database, so Everything will have to read through the content of all the files to find matches.
This will be slow, so it is recommended to limit the amount of files Everything has to read, for example by limiting the search to a specific folder and/or a daterange.

Example:

Code: Select all

ext:doc;docx   "c:\my files"   dm:thismonth   content:"some text"
This will find al docx and doc files in the folder c:\my files that were modified this month and also contain the text some text.
See Menu:Help > Search Syntax for details. Or use Advanced Serach (Menu:Search > Advanced Search ) to specify your search.

Note: For this to work, MS Office needs to be installed (@horst: yes, I know .. there are alternatives for that, but installing Office is the most straightforward)


It is on the to-do list to (optionally) include file content in the database, so then searching for content would instantly return results.
HungerFreeze
Posts: 44
Joined: Tue May 02, 2017 4:04 pm

Re: Searching within Microsoft Office File Contents

Post by HungerFreeze »

Thank you for your help, you guys. I appreciate it.

Hopefully, there will be a way to search within file contents in the future. Maybe even a semantics search!
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