Windows Grep

Working in an office environment no doubt fills up your computer with a staggering amount and diversity of documents. If the case requires it, you might need to find specific words or phrases inside documents, which is a pain if you manually go through all of them. Luckily, Windows Grep comes with what it needs in order to look up provided text strings and identify parent documents for you.

The application stores all of its features in a simple, yet intuitive interface that gets you quickly up and running. What's more, a wizard greets you each time in order to greatly simplify the process of adding search criteria.

Given the proper info regarding target text string and method to use, the application does a pretty good job in terms of both speed and efficiency. Going further down the path that leads to the start of the search process, you also need to provide at least one folder to look through, as well as custom file formats that don't need to be of a certain type.

It can take some time to finish the whole process in case don't cleverly narrow down search criteria. On the other hand, once results are retrieved, further filters can be applied, such as file contains, names, line numbers, word wrap and a few more.

Once the result is retrieved, various related info is displayed such as full path, size, number of occurrences, and even a different list with the exact text style as found in the looked up document. In case this task needs to be repeated, you can save search criteria to file so you can easily import it later on to save some setup time.

The application also gives you the possibility to replace text strings in gathered files, but take caution, because not all text formats are properly supported and you might end up with corrupt files.

All things considered, we can safely state that Windows Grep is not amongst the top utilities of its kind, mostly because of poor support for text files, since it looks up content. Functionality is not an issue, and getting acquainted only takes little of your time. Overall, it's worth a try when you urgently need to find bits of text in one or more documents that they too are difficult to find.