A Better "Ctrl F"

[noname2020x]

I am looking for a better control f program. My friend is going to great lengths to search for names in historical documents, but as it turns out, they are spelled differently depending on things like region and literacy. I am looking for a program that allows one to type something like "John *** Happ" and it will find everything in the document that contains "John Happ" with three characters in between. Any number of other search functions would be helpful as well. Anyone know of any enhanced "Ctrl F" programs?

 

[txus.palacios]

LibreOffice Writer supports regex. You could perform that John *** Happ search looking for "John ... Happ".

 

[petteyg359]

Notepad++ also supports regular expressions. For anybody looking for a "ctrl f program", learning regular expressions is what they really want http://www.regular-expressions.info has a good starting guide.

 

[noname2020x]

Wonderful! Thanks guys!

 

[c627627]

How would I go about searching for words within an .XLS file? I'm in the process of creating an inventory of cutting tools we have in our job boxes and I would like to be able to search for ".693 reamer" and find which job box is holding that tool?

Like this:

kind:xls content:".693 reamer"


Windows 7/8 Search is powerful, you need an advanced degree to know how to actually use it, and there is no GUI for even basic searches, but it is powerful... unreliable and powerful