How do I search comments in hundreds of Word Documents?

January 13, 2011 3:02 PM

How do I search comments in hundreds of Word Documents?

Hi,

I am a long-time reader and a first-time asker. Is there anyone who can help me with a problem?

I have several thousand comments in hundreds of Microsoft Word documents. The comments were added using the "Comments" feature in Word. While I am able to search within all Word documents using Explorer or another word search program, neither will search the comments.

Would anyone know how to search the comments without opening each file in Word and searching each file individually?

Any help would be appreciated.

posted by millerizer to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Which operating system(s) are you using, and what version of Word do you have?

In Windows 7, I had to search for content: thatword, and it found the document with the comment. I opened the document in Word 2010, and searched for thatword, and it found what I was looking for.

In earlier versions of Windows, you can search for the text in documents (what the "content" term forces in Win7). I'm not sure how earlier versions of Word handle content searches from there.
posted by filthy light thief at 3:20 PM on January 13, 2011

There's a macro here that will do the comment export thing. Next you would need a way to loop through all your documents and run it on them automatically without you having to open each one, which unfortunately I cannot help with.
posted by yarrow at 3:46 PM on January 13, 2011

Have you tried just the plain Start Menu search feature of Windows 7? I ask this because I just checked and it will find text in the comments of ODF (Openoffice.org) files.
posted by oddman at 7:40 PM on January 13, 2011

Do you have access to a mac or linux shell? Even though word documents are binary blobs, the "strings" command will often pull out the text (and I would assume the comments). Something like this might do the trick:

find . -name "*.doc" | while read i;do strings $i | grep -H "MYPHRASE";done
posted by chrisamiller at 9:10 PM on January 13, 2011