Introducing “File Content Finder” — a simple tool for document text search

4 min readJun 2, 2019

Introduction

We are happy to announce the release of File Content Finder, a cross platform app for searching text in documents!

But how is it different from all other search tools, I hear you ask?

Indeed, there are many file search apps out there, like EasyFind and Tembo to name a couple. However, most of them only search files by their names. They can’t search in the files’ content. Unlike them, the free version of Agent Ransack does contents search. However, it only works on Windows and doesn’t support some popular document types — e.g. MS Word “doc” files. Other professional document content search tools are expensive, aimed at enterprise customers, and require indexing of your document repository.

This is why we created File Content Finder. You can get it straight from the Mac App Store or the Windows Store. It doesn’t require indexing and works out of the box. Let’s see what it can do!

Basic Usage

When you open File Content Finder, you’ll see the following simple screen:

Main Screen — just select a folder to search in, and a search phrase.

Enter a search phrase. Then select or drag a folder containing your documents and click “Search”.

The “Search” button will appear after you enter a search phrase and select a folder.

File Content Finder will inspect all documents in the selected folder and its subfolders and will list the matching files:

Search results in a table. You can sort and filter the results. Each row in the results has 2 buttons — for opening the file and for opening its containing folder.

Multiple Languages and Scripts

File Content Finder can search text in any language or script, including Chinese, Japanese, and Cyrillic. Below is an example of searching in Simplified Chinese:

Advanced Filtering and Search

What if you have a huge number of files matching your query? How would narrow down to the few appropriate files? What if you have thousands of file, and you want to quickly search only a few of them?

This is where the “Search Settings” menu of File Content Finder comes in handy. It allows you to filter out documents by a number of criteria.

Firstly, you can ignore files by their type and extension:

Select the file types to include in the search.

Note that you can even search in jpg and png images via optical character recognition (OCR)! This is useful when you are dealing with scanned receipts or documents. If you’re using OCR, you’ll need to specify the document language in the “Search language” tab.

You can also choose which sub-folders to exclude/black-list:

Lastly, you can filter files by their creation and last modification dates. This is useful when you’re searching a document you edited or created recently:

Filter files by their creation of last modification dates.

Video Demo

Let’s see the entire process in action:

End-to-end demonstration of File Content Finder.

Frequently Asked Questions

While we encourage you to contact us with queries, you may find it faster to check out the following Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and answers:

Can I get a free trial before I purchase the app? Can I get refund if I purchase and don’t find it useful?

Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t make it easy to provide full featured trials.

You can ask Apple or Microsoft for a refund if the app doesn’t meet your needs after purchase. It usually takes them up to a week to process refund requests. They may wish to call you to elaborate on your reasons, although that’s rare. Here is how Apple refunds work. For more on Apple refunds check here and here. For Microsoft’s store refund process — check here.

Can I search in password protected or encrypted documents?

No. There’s no way for us to know your password.

Can I search files in a network drive or server (e.g. FTP/SMB/AFP/WebDav)?

We support network file shares if they are mounted as volumes. On Mac, for example, using the top menu navigate to Go -> Connect to Server..., Then enter the server address and credentials. The network share will appear in Finder as a Volume and will be selectable from the app. On Windows, you may need to use 3rd party software as discussed here. The search performance will depend on your network speed.

I have thousands of large documents. How do I speed up the search?

File Content Finder does not index your hard drive and may search more slowly if you have a huge amount of document data. To speed it up, consider filtering files and folders as described in the “Advanced Filtering and Search” section above.