Question

Is there a free way to perform a text search in PDF and XLS (Excel spreadsheet) files?

I want to be able to find a specific word in these type of files.
Is there a free tool for that?

Answer 1

There are several open source tools that convert binary files like PDF or XLS to plain text. Then use grep to search the text.

For instance:

$ pdftotext file.pdf | grep "some text"

Some tools:

• pdftotext: http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html
• xls2csv: http://wagner.pp.ru/~vitus/software/catdoc/ (also tools for Word and Powerpoint)

If you are on Windows, I suggest you install Cygwin and add the xpdf and catdoc packages. On my Ubuntu GNU/Linux box, I type apt-get install xpdf-utils catdoc to install the tools I mention above.

Answer 2

The free viewer xpdf, native to Unix/X, can perform text searching including OCR on scanned pages and images. I was startled when I found that out as it is such an ancient tool.

It is also available for Windows. See http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/xpdf.htm

Answer 3

I knew you can use poi to open xls file.

Answer 4

Total Commander has a plugin called TextSearch that can search through almost anything you can throw at it.

Answer 5

Do you want to find files that contain your search terms or every instance of the search terms in each file?

If you're running Windows XP (or later, I assume), you can simply use Windows search to do the former. Go to the directory where your files are and hit Ctrl-F. Put what you're searching for in the Containing Text box, and away you go. Excel and PDF files that contain your search terms will be included in the results.

To search within each file, just open it and hit Ctrl-F. Both Excel and all PDF readers include text searching within the document you're looking at.

Answer 6

For searching XLS files and PDF files with text available, you can search with local search engines like:

• Index Your Files
• Everything

Note that you will not be able to search scanned PDFs as the text is not embedded in the PDF. However it is possible to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to embed text into PDFs.