Search a folder of docs for amounts of a certain phrase

I'm trying to figure out exactly how many individual letters I created in a certain period. I have them all saved in a single folder, but each doc file has a different number of letters in it. At the end of a letter writing session, I often just save the whole lot as one file.

I got the idea to search the folder for instances of a certain phrase I know is in each letter, and only once each letter. When I search for this phrase, I just get every doc in the folder, as you'd expect. Is there a way of finding out specifically how many instances of the search phrase are in the search results?

I know I could do a Windows search, open each result in Word, do a Find, and count them all up, but there are 1,700 different docs in the folder.

Hello Nulltown,

Welcome to Seven Forums!

That is what GREP does with text files under UNIX/LINUX operating systems. So one way would be to batch convert all your DOC files into TXT files and then use GREP to find occurances of a word pattern.

You cannot do that in Windows 7 because GREP does not run on this Operating System. You can, as you said, use Windows Explorer to search file contents. But that method does not show all matches that occurs within one file.

So, I did a bit of searching around on the web, and I found this opensource tool called
Common Resource GREP - crgrep. This program is like GREP, only it runs on a Windows Operating System and claims that it can search Microsoft Office files, too.

Good Luck