A couple of days ago, a co-worker had to separate 50-100 PDF files according to a specific serial number that appeared on each one of them. He thought he had to go through all of them, however I just came to the rescue, and explained that he can accomplish the task in a much easier way.
So I thought that other people might have the same need, and although it is a trivial task, I decided to make a blog post about it.
Start Adobe Reader (I am using version 9.0 for the screenshots).
From the main menu, go to Edit -> Search.
On the search dialog that has just opened up, select the “All PDF Documents in” option.
Browse for the folder that contains the PDF files that have to be searched.
Adobe Reader is automatically looking in the selected folder’s subfolders for PDF files.
Type your search keywords, and check some of the extra options if required.
Simply click on the Search button and wait for the results.
Results are ordered by PDF file, and you can even go directly to the specific pages that contain the search terms.
If you are often dealing with multiple document files, text, PDF, Office files etc., it might be a good idea to take a look at Google Desktop. Google Desktop is going through all of your documents, and makes an index out of them. Thus at any time you can perform a full document search on your Desktop, and instantly get results back.
Nice, thank you my man!
I use this feature to find any PDFs that have the word error in them after I’ve generated a whole bunch – gives me a list of documents I need to delete and regenerate.
Does anyone know how to use this feature to search for the ‘broken image red x icon’ indicating a graphic that was embedded in the PDF but referenced an invalid URL?
Great article. One important question though. When you have found your articles in the pdf documents, how do you print them all together? My problem is that I have to open them one by one and print them. Isn’t there a possibility to print these documents all together without opening them?
Thanks!
David
This article helped me out too – thanks a lot.
The only problem I have is when reviewing the search hits (i.e. “Results are ordered by PDF file, and you can even go directly to the specific pages that contain the search terms”).
The problem is that when going to the specific pages the search terms are highlighted in the standard pale blue (hard to see) and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to change that colour to something more obvious…. Does anyone know? I assume it’s an Acrobat preference somewhere…?
The article is short and crisp, neat work.
Very helpful, thanks. Does anyone know how to MOVE the found documents to another directory to separate them from the ones that do not contain the searched item . . . without manually making a list and then selecting and moving them in windows explorer?
Thank you!
Thank you so much. You’ve saved me about 30 mins every month!
I never would’ve thought to look for this type of feature within Adobe Reader, but thankfully I googled it and came across your post. Same concept applies in the newer versions, but it’s been seperated out into Advanced Search now.