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Word Scrounger

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Search for words in Microsoft Windows documents. Show the results in context.

Supported document types:

Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx)
Text (.txt)
OpenDocument (.odt)
Rich Text Format (.rtf)
Portable Document Format (.pdf)

Word Scrounger FAQs

General

Why do I need Word Scrounger?

When you use Microsoft Windows' File Explorer to do a word search, the result is a list of files. That's it. Nothing about how many times the word was found in each file, and nothing to show how the word is used.

If the list contains multiple files, you'll have to open each file and then use a file editor's search feature to see if the file has what you're trying to find. One ... file ... at ... a ... time. What fun.

Word Scrounger makes it easy to find what you're looking for. For every file that contains your word, Scrounger lists the file along with a hit count of the number of times the word was found. Click on the file's expand icon, and the Scrounger lists each hit plus words before and after the hit to show how it's used.

File searches that don't leave you in the dark. THAT'S why you need Word Scrounger.

What is a scrounger?

A scrounger is someone who tracks down things that are difficult to obtain. American TV and cinema have a long history of portraying scroungers — usually in a military or prison setting — as smart, clever, and with an uncanny ability to find almost anything.

Think of Word Scrounger as your own personal scrounger. But unlike those cinematic tropes, you don't risk time in the cooler if you are caught using it.

Using Word Scrounger

What is a hit?

A "hit" is text that matches your search request. For example, if you search for the word "hello" and it is found 10 times in a file, Word Scrounger would say that there were 10 hits in that file.

What is the difference between "Search" and "Find"?

When you click on the "Search" button, Word Scrounger looks for your search text in files.

"Find" does not search files. Instead, it searches the text contained in the Scrounger's search results window. Thus, "Find" is only useful if the target text is very close to the word you targeted in your original search.

The "Find" dialog is displayed by entering CTRL+F, but is only available if the search results window is not empty.

What is the difference between "File filter" and "File types"?

These two options together tell Word Scrounger which files to search.

File filters work like they do in the Window’s File Explorer. For example, "*.txt" will search for all files with a "txt" file extension.

The file types checkboxes represent the file formats that Word Scrounger knows how to read. The Scrounger will only search a file type when its checkbox is checked.

All file types except "Plain text" are associated with a standard file suffix. That means that you can use either a file filter or the file types options for searching a particular type of file. For example, Word documents usually have a *.docx suffix, so setting the filter to "*.docx" or only checking the "Microsoft Word" file type will generally have the same effect.

Plain text files use a variety of extensions. "*.txt" is the most obvious, but there are many other extensions that represent plain text files. For example, the files for programming languages like Java (*.java), JavaScript (*.js), and C# (*.cs) are plain text files.

For more efficient searches, uncheck any file types that you don't need to search. For example, we recommend that you uncheck the "PDF" checkbox unless it is needed because PDF searches are slow compared to searches done on other files.

What is the "Search files from last search" checkbox used for?

When this checkbox is checked, the Scrounger looks for the search text in the files listed in the search results from the previous search. This provides a simple of way of doing complex searches.

For example, if you want to find all files that contain the words "hello" and "goodbye", first enter "hello" as the search text and click "Search". After the search completes, check the "Search files from last search" checkbox, enter "goodbye" as the search text, and click "Search" again.

What is a regular expression?

A regular expression (a.k.a. "regex") is a way of defining complex search patterns using special characters. If you are not a software developer you may not have heard of regexes, but they are a common feature of most modern programming languages.

A simple example of a regex is "hello|goodbye". When used with the regex option in Word Scrounger, this search term will return a hit if either "hello" or "goodbye" is found in the file being searched.

Entire books and websites have been devoted to regexes, so there are plenty of resources out there if you want to learn more. However, as many a veteran developer can tell you, beware -- here, there be dragons.

Can I only search for words?

When the tooltips and FAQs talk about searching for a "word", that’s just our shorthand for whatever text you care to enter into the search field. Feel free to scrounge for words, word fragments, phrases, or entire sentences.

Why are PDF searches so slow?

Extracting text from a PDF is hard. The PDF file format is not optimized for access to the text contained in the file. Instead, it is a visual format that was designed to display documents in a consistent way regardless of the software or hardware used to view the documents.

To get text from a PDF, it often must be reconstructed from a jumbled collection of letters, word fragments, and other text artifacts whose relationship can only be determined by their relative positions on the page. As a result, searching a PDF will almost always be slower (sometimes much, much slower) and less reliable than searching a plain text or word processing file that contains the same text.

Some PDFs are not searchable using the tools available to Word Scrounger. For example, PDFs of old books or magazine articles are often a collection of poorly-framed full page images that cannot be searched. Also, handwritten text in PDFs is never searchable.

Why isn't my target text found in a PDF that I know has it?

A PDF file that displays text in a PDF reader may internally define the text using two basic techniques:

As text with instructions on how to display the text
As images containing text.

A given PDF may mix both techniques.

The Scrounger can only search the text portions of a PDF. It cannot search images. Thus, if it searches a PDF and cannot find text you know is there, it's probably because the text is in an image.

For example, many old book PDFs are just a collection of scanned page images that contain little or no text outside of the images. Scrounger searches of these types of PDFs will not return any hits.

Why are some OneDrive files not searched?

When searching files in folders that are managed by Microsoft's OneDrive file service, you may see search results marked "OD" in the Scrounger's search results. This indicates that although the file exists, it couldn't be searched because OneDrive has not downloaded the contents of the file to your computer.

You can typically tell OneDrive to keep a copy of a file or folder on your computer by right-clicking on the item in Windows' File Explorer and selecting "Always keep on this device". Be sure you have enough space on your computer's hard drive before setting the "keep" option on a folder.

For more information on how OneDrive decides when to keep a file synced to your device, consult Microsoft's documentation on OneDrive's "Files On-Demand" option.

Supported formats

Can I use Word Scrounger if I don’t have Microsoft Word?

Yes. The "Word" in the name "Word Scrounger" refers to the linguistic definition of "word", not specifically to the Microsoft Word app.

Thus, if you do not have Microsoft Word installed on your computer, Word Scrounger will still be able to search the file types it supports, even Microsoft Word files.

Does Word Scrounger work with Google Docs?

Sort of. Word Scrounger does not support online searches. However, Google Docs can download documents in a number of different formats supported by the Scrounger. So, you can download your Google Docs documents to your local drive and then search them using Word Scrounger.

Why can't the Scrounger search images?

Searching images would require use of a good OCR (optical character recognition) engine. That would add complexity and cost for something that would likely be of limited value. So, there are currently no plans to add this feature to the Scrounger.