Free software to search windows file system

Cheetah Designs · 11 Mar 2013 at 10:14

I want to search a file system for excel spreadsheets that call a particular function. If I right click on one of these spreadsheets I can find the function name in plaintext but using the inbuilt windows search doesn't pick up any results.

Anyone got any tools or scripts that will allow me to do this?

Windows XP.

Cheers

bledd · 11 Mar 2013 at 10:43

http://ss64.com/nt/findstr.html

I'm not sure if it'll work for excel, I assume they're not stored in plaintext.

Certainly works for XML, CSV and TXT files

marc2003 · 11 Mar 2013 at 11:49

if you open an .xls file in notepad it's just gibberish so you'll need a tool specifically for working with excel files. i have no idea.

Cheetah Designs · 11 Mar 2013 at 11:57

marc2003 said:
if you open an .xls file in notepad it's just gibberish so you'll need a tool specifically for working with excel files. i have no idea.

Open it in Notepad++ and I can do a search for the function name and find it.

marc2003 · 11 Mar 2013 at 12:03

problem solved then. i know notepad++ can search in multiple files and supports wildcards for filenames. you just tell it what folder to look in.

Cheetah Designs · 11 Mar 2013 at 12:09

marc2003 said:
problem solved then. i know notepad++ can search in multiple files and supports wildcards for filenames. you just tell it what folder to look in.

I just tried it on a folder with 9 spreadsheets in....and its causing the UI to crash.

I want to search a far far far far larger set of files than that.

I am expecting 10,000+ results. All I want is a list of files.

marc2003 · 11 Mar 2013 at 12:16

ok, problem not solved.

or don't click on it while it's working and just leave it. it may take some time.

or does it really crash even when you don't do anything? i've seen it go unresponsive before but it comes back after time.

Cheetah Designs · 11 Mar 2013 at 12:28

Sorry what I meant was it goes unresponsive....doesn't seem to be using much CPU though?

El_Watcher · 11 Mar 2013 at 13:08

Can you not just use Excel? I know in Excel 2003, you can do an advanced search to find all files with certain text.

Open Excel
Click Open
Click Tools -> Search
Click Advanced
Add text or property to search for and add (includes say "=SUM(F18:F25)")
Click Search In to select folder/s
Click File type and only select Excel.
Go

Excel 2007, 2010 and 2013 should have the same function somewhere.