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How To Search Text In Multiple Excel Files Quickly

How To Search Text In Multiple Excel Files Quickly 1

Working with big Excel spreadsheets never have been easy, especially when you need to search for a piece of text in a file that have thousands, even ten of thousands rows. Searching through a single file can cost you hours, if not days if you work on a slow computer. To make the matter worse, sometimes you need to search in multiple files and search for multiple strings.

Let me give you an example.

I have a imaginary store that sells auto parts. My store has over 400,000 items and they are in two separated files. Opening it on an old computer is problematic. 

search text in multiple excel files

Now, for example, I want to search for parts that contain the text “SPLS” for some reasons. If I go with the traditional way, I would press control + F (or Command + F on a Mac) to start searching. To be very honest with you, looking for results from thousands or million in my case is not an easy task.

To make the problem worse, what if I want to search for multiple text, not just one? What if you need to search for multiple text in MULTIPLE files? Excel only provides us one search box and you can search for one string of text at a time.

Are we out of luck? Is there any better way to search for:

  • Multiple text
  • In multiple Excel files

Search Text In Multiple Excel Files Using Software

Luckily, there is a better way to do this boring task, which is using a pieces of software made exactly to do this task.

Let’s have a look at the software and how it works.

As you can see, this is the software that solves the searching problem in big excel files. You see its true value when you have many files to search and many text to find. Also, the larger the files, the more time the software can save you.

This is the way this software work step by step:

  1. You select the file or files you need to search by clicking on add excel files button at the top left of the panel. You can select multiple excel files using this button.
  2. Then, enter the text you want to search in these files, you need to enter one search per line. There is no limit.
  3. Click on start searching

It takes some time for the software to go through the files and find the text you want to find. As you can guess, the bigger the files, the longer it takes to find all matches. However, in comparison to a human, the software is much quicker, by hundreds times.

You may wonder, is this for Windows only? Good news is Excel Ultimate Search works perfectly on Windows, Mac, and Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, Centos…)

excel-ultimate-search-works-on-windows-linux-macos

Download Excel Ultimate Search

Download the app now to get instant access!

How To Search Text In Multiple Excel Files Quickly 2
How To Search Text In Multiple Excel Files Quickly 3