Search Through OpenOffice Documents to Find Text, Keywords, Phrases or Regexp Matches

With PowerGREP, you can quickly search for a piece of information through files and folders on your computer, including OpenOffice documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. saved in the OpenDocument Format. Simply type in a keyword or phrase in the Search box, select which folder PowerGREP should go through and which types of files are of interest. When you click the search button, PowerGREP will present you with a list of MS Word documents and other files in which the text you entered in the search box was found. The list will show one line of context for each match. You can instantly inspect the entire context by double-clicking on the match in the results.

When you do not know in advance exactly what you are looking for, PowerGREP's rich regular expression support allows you to search for virtually anything by specifying the form of what you want, and let PowerGREP find the actual text matching that form.

With PowerGREP's collect data feature, you can extract data from OpenOffice documents and other files and automatically save the extracted data into one or more new text files. You can group identical matches together and count them, producing informative statistics.

OpenOffice uses a file format called the OpenDocument Format (ODF). These files have various extensions, such as .odt for Writer and .ods for Calc. PowerGREP comes preconfigured to handle all the extensions with the file mask *.od[bcfgimpst]. This format is officially documented, and even standardized. Still, it is incredibly complex, simply because OpenOffice offers a tremendous amount of features.

ODF files are technically ZIP archives that contain a bunch of XML files along with support files such as images. While PowerGREP treats ZIP archives as compressed folders, transparently zipping and unzipping files inside them, PowerGREP treats ODF files as single document files. If this sounds confusing: PowerGREP simply treats your OpenOffice files the way you expect it to when marking files to be searched through, and when telling PowerGREP to copy or move files around. The whole ODF file will be moved, rather than the XML files inside of it.

By default, PowerGREP uses the IFilter that is included with OpenOffice to extract the text from ODF files. You'll see a plain text representation of your ODF files in PowerGREP. When using the IFilter, PowerGREP cannot modify ODF files because the IFilter system is read-only.

PowerGREP is not capable of displaying formatted text or pages like OpenOffice. Instead, PowerGREP searches through the raw XML content of ODF files. PowerGREP can also search-and-replace through ODF files in this mode. Though all those XML tags may seem to get into your way at first, that extra bit of complexity actually opens up a whole world of possibilities. The XML tags represent your document's formatting. By searching for, removing and inserting the XML tags, you can search for and alter the formatting of your document. To find out which tags to use, simply create a few test documents in OpenOffice using the formatting you want. Navigate inside the ODF files in PowerGREP's File Selector. Right-click on one of the XML files inside it, and select Edit. PowerGREP's editor will show you the raw XML code that PowerGREP searches through.

There are two ways in which you can get your own copy of PowerGREP and evaluate the software risk-free.

The best option is to buy your own copy of PowerGREP for US$ 159. Your purchase is covered by Jan Goyvaerts's personal three month risk-free unconditional money-back guarantee. This allows you to try the software without any limitations and without any risk for three months.

Alternatively, you can download the free evaluation version of PowerGREP. The free evaluation version can be downloaded anonymously. It allows you to explore PowerGREP for 15 days of actual use. Full documentation is included. The documentation extensively covers both PowerGREP itself, and the regular expression syntax.