Finding Documents Containing Multiple Occurrences of a Word

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated January 7, 2023)

Brian has a lot of Word documents. When displaying the Open dialog box or when using a regular folder window, he can search and display only documents that contain a specific word. He wonders, though, if there is a way to display only documents that contain at least two occurrences (or more) of a particular word. In other words, he wants to exclude the display of documents that either don't contain the word or that have only a single occurrence of the word.

This is actually quite easy to do—just use a wildcard character when setting up your search. For instance, let's say that you want to search for documents that contain at least two instances of the word "widget." You could use this as your search criteria:

widget*widget

Note that the asterisk is a wildcard; it matches any number of characters. Thus, you end up searching for "widget" followed by any number of characters and then another instance of "widget." If the document contains only a single occurrence of the word "widget," then this search string automatically excludes those documents.

In order for this approach to work, you'll need to make sure that the "Always search file names and contents" option is selected in the Search tab of Folder Options dialog box.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (9957) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Word in Microsoft 365.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

MORE FROM ALLEN

Positioning Line Numbers

Line numbers can be added to a document, and is typically done in legal documents. The line numbers appear to the left of ...

Discover More

Word Count for Headers and Footers

Getting a word count for an entire document is rather easy. If you want a word count for a special part of a document ...

Discover More

Shortcut for Show/Hide

Hate to take your hands off the keyboard? Here's a handy keyboard shortcut you can use to display (or not display) the ...

Discover More

Learning Made Easy! Quickly teach yourself how to format, publish, and share your content using Word 2021 or Microsoft 365. With Step by Step, you set the pace, building and practicing the skills you need, just when you need them! Check out Microsoft Word Step by Step today!

More WordTips (ribbon)

Changes to Header Result in a Hung Computer

If you try to perform some actions in a document and those actions result in Word freezing, then your document may well ...

Discover More

Setting a Default Document Format

Word allows you to save your documents in a variety of different formats. You can specify the format when you actually ...

Discover More

Saving Everything

Need to force users to save their work? It may be as simple as implementing a couple of macros that get a bit more ...

Discover More
Subscribe

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in WordTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

View most recent newsletter.

Comments

If you would like to add an image to your comment (not an avatar, but an image to help in making the point of your comment), include the characters [{fig}] (all 7 characters, in the sequence shown) in your comment text. You’ll be prompted to upload your image when you submit the comment. Maximum image size is 6Mpixels. Images larger than 600px wide or 1000px tall will be reduced. Up to three images may be included in a comment. All images are subject to review. Commenting privileges may be curtailed if inappropriate images are posted.

What is five minus 2?

There are currently no comments for this tip. (Be the first to leave your comment—just use the simple form above!)


This Site

Got a version of Word that uses the ribbon interface (Word 2007 or later)? This site is for you! If you use an earlier version of Word, visit our WordTips site focusing on the menu interface.

Videos
Subscribe

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in WordTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

(Your e-mail address is not shared with anyone, ever.)

View the most recent newsletter.