How to Search in Windows 7 for text within a document?

Anonymous
2010-06-28T02:30:00+00:00

How do you search for a document by using searching specific text in the document? (Word or other searchable doc.) Other forum answers suggest that this will happen with the general search box that appears in the upper right corner of explorer - but this does not seem to be the case.

I have searched for known words, and documents do not come up.

Is there a default? Is there a way turn on the search within document? (formerly, the detailed search option for any folder would prompt you to select 'search within document.')

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Files, folders, and storage

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Anonymous
2010-07-06T20:15:26+00:00

Try just typing the phrase into the search box. If this doesn’t work, try content: “words in phrase”

Lisa

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  1. Anonymous
    2011-03-23T12:15:37+00:00

    I am having the same issues with Windows 7 search as bill6009. In XP it was every easy to conduct a search for a doc based on a word in the doc.

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  2. Anonymous
    2010-12-25T01:30:02+00:00

    Try just typing the phrase into the search box. If this doesn’t work, try content: “words in phrase”

    that does not work eather

    p Kueker

    *** Email address is removed for privacy ***

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  3. Anonymous
    2010-08-03T20:06:49+00:00

    Further results on the above.  I tried searching for just a single letter:

    content:u

    content:"u"

    content:*u*

    content:"*u*"

    In the first two tests, no file names were returned.  In the latter two cases, which use the asterisks, the search returned two file names.  Both of these files do, indeed, contain the letter being searched for.  However, many, many of the other files in this folder also contain the letter and were not returned.

    The two files returned were a TXT file and an INI file, two file types that are known to contain plain text.  The other files in the folder have other file types, ones that may be considered to be nonstandard, so perhaps the search function is just not looking in these files.  How can I convince Search to look in all files in the folder or folders without regard for the file type?  I tried

    *.*  content:*u*

    which also returned only the TXT and INI file names, so that didn't help.

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  4. Anonymous
    2010-08-03T19:49:53+00:00

    Lisa, I have the same question as the originator of this thread.  I am trying to search in Windows Explorer on Windows 7 for a file containing a particular word.  I can open one file that I know has the word in it and see the word in plain text.  Let's say that I am searching for the word "username".  I have typed each of the following in the search box.

    content:username

    content:"username"

    content: username

    content: "username"

    In none of these tests has the search turned up the word that I KNOW is in one of the files in this folder.   What am I missing?  I am doing what I understand from your reply that I should be doing.  Why would the search function not turn up the word that I know is there?  If I can't find a word that I know is there, the search for content is useless.

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