Find files with the indexing service

How can I index the text of local documents, particularly in Word and Acrobat?

I have cunningly filed all the documents I need to search in a few directories and I want to be able to search the contents of them, not just the titles. I can’t use the standard Search in Explorer to search through contents and I don’t want to have to be in Word to search either.

I have turned off the Indexing Service because it tends to make my machine sluggish, but I am wondering whether it would make sense to turn it back on and set it loose indexing my Acrobat and Office files?

The Indexing Service will take a while to index the contents of your documents the first time you start it, especially if you’ve got a lot of documents. But leave it running once and it will then keep track of new files in the background without disturbing you. This is because Windows XP helpfully waits until your PC isn’t busy to perform tasks such as these. To turn this feature on, choose Start > Search and click Change Preferences > ‘With Indexing Service (for faster local searches)’. Then click the ‘Change Indexing Service settings (Advanced)’ button to open the Indexing Service console. It can also be found in Computer Management, which you open by right-clicking on My Computer and choosing the Manage option.

As you’ve got your files in particular folders you can tell the Indexing Service to just look at those folders, which takes up less memory than indexing your entire hard drive, although it only needs 64MB of RAM to index up to 100,000 files. To do this, you simply have to click the Show/Hide Console tree button and then choose Directories. The Documents and Settings folders are there by default but you can add and remove folders. Choose Action > New > Directory to choose a folder that you want to index or that you want to leave out. This means you could choose a folder and then exclude just one of the sub-directories inside it. By default, the service indexes Microsoft Office documents, HTML and text files, as well as internet mail and news. You can also add PDF files with Adobe’s free filter, which is available from Adobe’s site at https://www.adobe.com/ support/downloads/register.jsp ?ftpID=1276.

To index all file types, rightclick on Indexing Service on Local Machine and choose Properties > Generation > ‘Index files with unknown extensions’. If you do find the Indexing Service is slowing your computer down, just right-click on Indexing Service and choose Stop, then select All Tasks > Tune Performance > Customize and set Indexing to Lazy. Rightclicking on the service will start it up again.

You can search the index using the ‘A word or phrase in the file’ field in the Search Companion. Alternatively, for complex queries using Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT and NEAR) and document properties, use the Query the Catalog tool in the Indexing Service console itself. Check the Help section for details of how to use advanced queries.