How to search for words in documents in Lion

Spotlight will index file contents,which should make this pretty easy, especially since they're standard file formats.

Just use System Preferences -> Spotlight to ensure that indexing is enabled on those file types, then use the Spotlight menu item (the mangifying glass at the right-hand end of your menubar) to enter the search term.

If you want to restrict the search to a particular folder, just open that folder in the Finder and hit Cmd-F - this will display the search criteria options, where you can choose to search Contents (via the first popup menu).

Open to correction here but I don't think Spotlight will do this for you, particulary if these are long documents. Spotlight does not index then entire document, just the first 2k approx unique terms within a document. If the string you're looking for isn't within that limit then it won't work.

Options:

1. You could import the documents to an app like DevonThink Pro or Circus Ponies Notebook that have a concordance feature.

2. You could convert the files to Text and search them with BBEdit or the grep command.

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20001105214242629

Use TextWrangler. It was built for this kind of job.

http://www.barebones.com/products/TextWrangler/benefits.html

Example:

Your company merges with another and now you have to go through thousands of text documents and change every occurrence of MegaCorp to Exegis International. TextWrangler’s multi-file search and replace makes short work of the job.