Advanced search in Word documents

[beirput]

Hi,



Is there way to search for certain words in multiple word-documents? I know that this is a standard function in Windows, but I want it a bit different.

I want to add certain key-words to my Word-documents. eg. 'Fincance'

When search for a certain keyword, I want to see all the Word-documents that have this key-word included. So I will be able to search for key-words that aren't in my text.

Is this possible?

Thanks!

[macropod]

There have been numerous macros posted in these forums for searching through Documents, using Find/Replace to update their content. A similar approach could be used for listing the documents that contain a particular string, but this is far more processor-intensive than what Windows Explorer does. Searching "for key-words that aren't in my text" could also be done using Find/Replace and would be equally processor-intensive.

[eNGiNe]

Just out of interest, would Properties > Tags help here? and if it would, then could people more competent than me use a macro to add a selected/highlighted word to the properties?

[macropod]

You could certainly add a tag containing words like 'Finance' to a document, but then you can't use either Windows Explorer or Word's own Find/Replace tools to build lists of documents lacking those tags. Plus, adding the tags adds another layer of complexity for documents where you might actually want the keywords to be present somewhere in the text rather than just in the metadata. Ultimately, a VbScript or Word macro is still going to have to examine every file.