Find a word in a file

How do I find a particular word that is in some file or document?


Current Pro Desktops

Posted on Dec 2, 2022 2:27 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Dec 2, 2022 2:39 PM

If you mean you want to search for which, if any, files contain a word, one option is to use Spotlight. Click the magnifying glass icon on the menu bar or use command spacebar to open it. Also see: Search with Spotlight on Mac - Apple Support


Note that the results will contain files as well as other results -- see the above link for information.

3 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Dec 2, 2022 2:39 PM in response to Nyagous

If you mean you want to search for which, if any, files contain a word, one option is to use Spotlight. Click the magnifying glass icon on the menu bar or use command spacebar to open it. Also see: Search with Spotlight on Mac - Apple Support


Note that the results will contain files as well as other results -- see the above link for information.

Dec 3, 2022 3:00 AM in response to Nyagous

If you are interested in finding a word using Spotlight, particularly in a Pages document, you have some options to narrow the search results. If you want to find a word in a Pages document created after a certain date, or in the second example, last opened in a date range. The third reveals Pages documents with a Baskerville font used in them:


kind:pages created:>07/01/2022 word
kind:pages date:>07/01/2022-09/30/2022 "two words or more"
kind:pages font:basker



You can change pages to Word (MS Word) or PDF if you want to narrow the search to those document types only.

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Find a word in a file

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