How to search for specific text string in Multiple Word, Excel, PDF and other Files

If you're a blogger like me, most likely you have a huge archive of your blog articles.

This is for record-keeping purposes as well as should it come to the worst and Blogger decided to shut you down as I've anticipated in my blog article entitled “How to do a backup of your Blogger Blog in case Blogspot Shuts you down”.

Point to note; I almost had a meltdown the day when they decided to shutdown Picasa, leaving me to do the painful job of migrating my pictures to Google Drive and slowly updating my 2500+ blog articles as detailed in my blog article entitled “How to embed Google Photos images in Blogger using Google Drive”. 

So being able to search through my massive archive of some 2500+ articles is a must. I need to know the specific document name while searching and archiving. But with 2500+ articles, I find that cannot remember them all. Instead, I remember keywords and what the blog articles were about.

Windows is no help; the search tools are very primitive and crashes whenever I try to search inside of a document. Worse, Windows cannot search *.PDF files, a format I'm considering to save space even as I shop online for a 1TB Hard Drive as explained in my Geezam blog article entitled “How to do Physical Backup using DVD and CD and Best software”.  

So what are my options to search for specific strong in any textual document on the Hard-drive of my Acer Aspire E 15 Start Laptop?

How to search any Textual Files – Agent Ransack, DocFetcher and FileSearchy

After much research and trial and error, I found some free computer programs that can searching for a specific text string inside all documents on a computer, be they:

1.         Microsoft Office

2.         OpenOffice

3.         PDF

4.         HTML

5.         Any document formats

So without further ado, here are the three (3) I strongly recommend to search your growing cache of Blog files documents:

1.      Agent Ransack

2.      DocFetcher

3.      FileSearchy

Granted Google has been working on Desktop search as explained in my blog article entitled “Google Desktop Search Patent and Why @Google's Alphabet will organize your 1TB SSD Drives”, but it's nowhere near as good as these free alternatives. Also, I’m not so trusting of Google poking around my Hard-drive, where other copyright-infringing files may lurk.

Sharing is caring, so share this info with your fellow bloggers having trouble keeping track of their massive growing archive of blog articles.