Search Utilities to Find Inside Excel

Desktop or document search utilities aim to make it easier for users to access the information or file that they need without digging through a directory structure. They have become more important in recent years, as the information age has come into full swing. Computers are becoming more powerful and also more commonplace, with more people relying on them for various tasks. Many different types of digital information, from family pictures to school papers to favorite songs to business spreadsheets are being stored on computers and laptops everywhere. In response, search utilities have been becoming more powerful and sophisticated as well, some boasting such advanced features as to be able to find inside Excel files any information you need!

The first document search utilities only considered filenames and file types to direct users to the files that they need. By typing in part of or the entire filename, these utilities would be able to display files matching that description. Specifying particular file types narrows the results further, making it easier and quicker for users to find what they need. However, this proves to be not quite enough, since users sometimes only have a rough idea of what they want to find. The complete or even partial filename of the file that they want may not come easily to mind, and in these cases, a more flexible and powerful search utility is needed.

This led to the development of search utilities that can also look through the contents of various files. Text files, word processor documents, and even PDFs are made searchable, adding a powerful new feature to search utilities. With this feature in place, users could more easily find those files that contain what they need by just recalling some part of its contents. But again, exact matching of file contents may sometimes be difficult, especially if the user does not remember exactly what the file that he wants contains.

So many search utilities support the use of regular expressions, which are expressions that specify the form of the search string, but not its exact value. For example, the expression [0-9] would be equivalent to searching for any integer from 0 to 9. The use of wildcard characters, such as in the string *** would, on the other hand, search for any three character long words, and so on. These regular expressions are very powerful, but must be used with care in order to get sensible results. Too general expressions would result in too many results. Hence, the use of regular expressions is often combined with filtering by document type and other search filters, for optimal results.

Combining these features with the new XLSX file format of Excel spreadsheets means that the information one can find inside Excel using a utility has greatly increased. This allows for searching through multiple Excel files for the same information in a single place, instead of having to open each file and use Excel’s own search function. This gives great convenience, especially for users who have to work with multiple spreadsheets.