SEE: 20 pro tips to make Windows 10 work the way you want (free PDF) (TechRepublic)įirst, to take advantage of the integration of Windows Search into File Explorer, make sure you’ve upgraded to the Windows 10 November 2019 Update version 1909.
Let’s look at how to use the Search tool in File Explorer. But even without this latest enhancement, there’s more to searching in File Explorer than meets the eye. This means you can click or type a keyword in the search field, and File Explorer will suggest files based on your search term. With the Windows 10 November 2019 Update, Microsoft has integrated Windows Search into File Explorer. But you can also search for files directly through File Explorer. In Windows 10, you can search for files and other content using the built-in Search tool on the Taskbar. Learn how you can tweak your searches from File Explorer to narrow or expand the results. I suggest you try out the different options and see which one works best for you.How to use the Search tool in Windows 10 File Explorer
So, those are basically the best ways to go about searching for text in a large number of files. Microsoft has a good tutorial on how to use Select-String, so make sure to read that. Again, there is a pretty big learning curve with these commands if you haven’t already used them. The second option is the Select-String command in Windows PowerShell. Obviously, this is a lot more complicated than using one of the programs above. As you can see, there are quite a few options. You can also type findstr /? at the command prompt and it’ll show you the usage. You can read the reference document here to learn how to use findstr.
Both are quite powerful and can find pretty much anything you are looking for. One runs in the normal command prompt and the other uses PowerShell.
If you only need to perform a quick search and don’t want to install a full-fledged program, you can use the built-in command line tools in Windows. It can even extract statistics from your log files and give that information to you.
I only recommend this program if you have some serious search needs that include finding text in Word files, PDF documents, Excel spreadsheets, etc. It’s a whopping $159! It’s pretty much got all the features mentioned above, plus some more, and all packaged nicely into a pretty little interface. This program has some serious features and a serious price tag to go along with it. If you are looking for the ultimate search program, then look for further than PowerGREP. The pro version costs $25 and seems to just disable the splash screen, otherwise the features are the same. The free version has a splash screen that you can’t disable. It’s pretty fast overall and shows you matches in a tabular format. BareGrepīareGrep is a fairly simple search program that supports regular expressions and all the basic search functions. I also find their interface to be more modern and pleasing to the eye. You can also save or print out all of the results for future reference. grepWin also has that option if you choose the Content radio button, but I think it’s implemented better in AstroGrep.ĪstroGrep can also search Word files, which is a handy feature. Not only does it get updated quite often, it also shows you where in the file the text was found. AstroGrepĪstroGrep is also another really good search program. The results are listed in the bottom window and you can just double-click on them to open the files. It also adds an option to the right-click context menu in Explorer to quickly search a folder. You can limit the search by file size, file type and other criteria. They also have a tutorial on their website to help with regular expressions, though you can Google for many more. It supports regular expressions and allows you to find and replace text also. GrepWin is probably the most popular out of the tools mentioned here.