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

It seems that when you search the first time it searches the file names but then under the search results you'll see a label titled "Search again in:"  Choose the Content button under "Search again in" and the search will restart and search the contents of the documents.

I tried looking in the "search again in" field and I don't have a "Content" button??  Where did you find that?

I tried the search again in "file contents" button (which is below: no items in search), and it does look inside the documents. But not inside pdf files. It does word, excel, powerpoint, and text files just fine, but not pdf. I need it to look inside the pdfs. I ran Text recognition on the pdf file to make sure that wasn't the problem. And it still wouldn't search inside the pdf.  What next?

Well, none of that works.  Searching the following strings gives me no documents or hundreds of documents.  I used to be able to find things with the XP search.  Now the search function is useless and your answer incorrect.

'content: "of, in, to" ' or "of, in, to"

Winephile,

I have also had great problems with Win7 searching.  For contents to be found, you need the syntax to be different from what you've given above [the following example finds files that have the text fred within them as long as those files are within those set for contents indexing in Control panel search options]

content:(fred)

I could not find a Win7 search syntax guide that includes this particular entry but I've tried it successfully.

I have also installed SearchMyFiles - Alternative to Windows Search For Files + Duplicates Search and it is a very good utility.

PDF contents' searching - not an answer but a good alternative

I missed dancetolead's query above as I don't get on the forum much these days.  There are several threads that refer to pdf indexing but I could never get any suggested solutions to work.  The Adobe forums are also vocal on the subject & it seems that there is no fix yet [apparently an Adobe dll file needs to be modified for Win7 searching to deal with pdf contents properly].  As an alternative,

1  Open Adobe Reader and see if there is a binoculars icon on the toolbar indicating the "Advanced search" facility.  Maximise the window first or it might be there but simply not visible.

2  If it has not been set up yet then - View menu, Show/hide, Toolbar items, Edit, Show all edit tools, select Advanced search.

3  Click on advanced search & enter something that appears more than once in  any pdf document you happen to have open at the time. You'll see how it displays results in a tree structure - I've found this such a marvellous facility when researching subjects that I now routinely save "static" Office documents in pdf just so I can use this search capability.

4  Note that you can set it to search in the current document or across complete folder structures.  This is where the Adobe Advanced search really impresses.  The tree structure of results makes it very easy to find your way around.  Once you've used it in a particular folder then that folder will always appear in the dropdown list so you don't have to browse for it everytime.