With PowerGREP, you can quickly search for a piece of information through files and folders on your computer, including Microsoft Word documents saved in DOC, DOT and DOCX files. Simply type in a keyword or phrase in the Search box, select which folder PowerGREP should go through and which types of files are of interest. When you click the search button, PowerGREP will present you with a list of MS Word documents and other files in which the text you entered in the search box was found. The list will show one line of context for each match. You can instantly inspect the entire context by double-clicking on the match in the results.
Prior to Office 2007, Microsoft Word used a proprietary file format to store its documents. These files have a .doc or .dot extension. The file format is not documented officially. Because the file format is very complex, most applications that can handle Word documents rely on Microsoft Word itself.
Since PowerGREP needs to be able to search through a large number of files in a reasonable amount of time, running Microsoft Word in the background is not an option. Instead, PowerGREP will open the DOC file directly, without the help of MS Word, and extract the text from the file. Text formatting, images and other special content are ignored. The extracted text is what PowerGREP searches through. When inspecting search matches inside PowerGREP, the built-in file editor will show the plain text version that PowerGREP actually searched through. You can always click use the Edit button's drop-down menu to open the file in Microsoft Word.
PowerGREP is not able to modify DOC files. You cannot search-and-replace through DOC files using PowerGREP. If you want to modify Word document with PowerGREP, consider switching to the DOCX format.
PowerGREP can search and even replace through Microsoft Office Open XML files (*.docx). These files are technically .zip archives containing one or more XML files and other supports files (such as image files). PowerGREP cannot interpret the XML formats to display a formatted page like Microsoft Word does. PowerGREP will display and search through the raw XML. Both the XML tags and the actual content of the document will be searched through.
PowerGREP可以对MS OFFICE OPEN XML文档(*.docx)进行搜索乃至替换操作。准确地说,此类文档其实是由zip打包的一个或一些XML文档以及其它支持文件(例如图片文件)。PowerGREP不能像MS Word那样将XML文件翻译转换为格式化的文档,而只是对原始XML文件进行搜索操作。搜索时,XML tags和实际内容都在搜索的范围之内。