Editor’s note: This is an update to the Adobe Acrobat Training Videos: Searching Fundamentals post. A related post is Three Types of PDFs.

Basic Search

This is a brief guide on the fundamentals of searching PDFs using Adobe Acrobat Pro. We will review how to run searches within a single PDF and across multiple PDFs. Searches can even be run on an entire folder of documents such as one that contains all the discovery you receive in a case. Searching in Acrobat will be useful only if the PDF files have searchable text. For scanned paper, you must make sure that they have been OCR’d first. OCR stands for ‘Optical Character Recognition’, and it is a process that reads pictures and turns them in letters and words so that they can be searched.

You can search not only the text of a document, but also any Adobe comments and bookmarks made on it. Searches can be run using either the “Find” or “Advanced Search” options. The way in which search results are displayed and what additional features may be available depend on the search tool chosen. The ‘Find’ tool can perform a quick search. With a PDF file open, display the ‘Find’ toolbar by choosing ‘Find’ from the main menu (Figure 1). There is also a ‘Find’ toolbar in the upper right-hand corner of the document which can be activated by clicking on the magnifying glass icon or by pressing ‘Control+F’ on your keyboard (Figure 2).

To perform a find, type a search term – for example, the term ‘Memo’. Acrobat will provide a preview of the number of hits for that word in document (Figure 3). After you hit enter on your keyboard, the search results will be shown highlighted in blue (Figure 4). If the term appears multiple times within a document, we can use the ‘Next’ and ‘Previous’ buttons to move from hit to hit. As we navigate through the search results, note that Acrobat highlights not only the word ‘Memo’ each time it appears, but also highlights any word which includes the letters ‘M-E-M-O’, such as ‘memoranda’ and ‘memorandum’.

There is a drop-down button next to the search term where we can select ‘Whole Words Only’, ‘Case Sensitive’, or choose to include bookmarks or comments (Figure 5). We will go over these features in greater detail when we look at the ‘Advanced Search’ tool below.

If we run a new find for the term ‘Xanadu’, a message appears letting us know that no hits were found ‘No results found’ (Figure 6). We will only get this message if the document is searchable and the word appears nowhere in the document. But, if we get a scanned alert page message, Acrobat is letting us know there is no searchable text associated with the document. For you to run your search, you will first have to OCR the document. If you need guidance on how to OCR the document, refer to the Acrobat OCR tutorial on this website.

Searching Comments

To search through just the comments, we can use the find tool in the comments list menu. To access this feature, select the ‘Comments’ icon in the upper right corner of the document (Figure 7). In this particular example we have 48 comments (Figure 8). Entering the term memo in the ‘Search’ box filters the list down to 4 comments and highlights the results (Figure 9). You can also sort and filter the list based on certain criteria such as comment author and comment type. To access this feature, click on the ellipses icon to the right of the search tool. (Figure 10). This opens an ‘Options’ menu. The ‘sort comments’ menu is the first level down is (Figure 11).

Advanced Search

While the find tool is quick, easy, and useful, the ‘Advanced Search’ tool has more features and is the preferred means of searching by many people. To open the advanced search window, select ‘Advanced Search’ from the main menu, or use the ‘Shift+Control+F’ keyboard shortcut (Figure 12). Acrobat will launch a new ‘Advanced Search’ dialog box (Figure 13). To automatically adjust the sizing of this window to fit nicely alongside the one showing your document click on the ‘Arrange Windows’ button.

When we run an Advanced Search for the term ‘Memo’, Acrobat generates a list of the results with some context. We can navigate between the results by clicking on them. Acrobat will go to the page and highlight the result in blue (Figure 14).

If we click on ‘New Search’ we can now either re-run the ‘Memo’ search or type in a new search term. This time, before we click the search button, let’s consider some of the additional features that we saw earlier when we used the find tool (see Figure 5 above). The ‘Whole Words Only’ and ‘Case Sensitive’ tools will limit the search based on the criteria selected (Figure 15).

When we re-run the search now, with these options checked, we will only get ‘Memo’ with a capital ‘M’ because we typed in the term in the search box with that exact capitalization. Other words containing the letters ‘Memo’ like ‘Memorandum’ are excluded because we also limited our search to only the whole word, ‘Memo’ and not any words containing those letters (Figure 16).

While ‘Case Sensitive’ and ‘Whole words only’ will restrict the search, ‘Include Bookmarks’ and ‘Include Comments’ will expand it. When we run the ‘Memo’ search again with these options selected, any comments or bookmarks with the term will be included in the list of results (Figure 17). We can tell if the result is a comment or a bookmark by looking at the icon next to it. Just like with text results, we can navigate to a bookmark or comment result by clicking on it (Figure 18). These features can be used in various combinations to further define your search.

If we click on ‘New Search’ again, options we previously selected are still marked (Figure 19). Acrobat retains the selections you make in the ‘Advanced Search’ window until you change them. Review these options before each search, as the number and type of search results can vary greatly depending on what options are marked.

Advanced Search – Multiple PDFs

Advanced search also enables you to look for a search term in multiple PDFs. This is helpful as often we receive multiple files we want to search through. Without this option, each file would need to be opened and searched separately. From the ‘Advanced Search’ window, select ‘All PDF Documents in’ (Figure 20) and then use the down arrow to choose a location. There are ‘Desktop’, ‘My Documents’ options and drive letter options, as well as a ‘Browse for Location’ option. We recommend that you choose the ‘Browse for Location’ option and navigate to a specific folder. This option will include the PDF files within the folder and any subfolders in that location (Figure 21).

Let’s choose a location where we have our discovery materials and run a search for ‘Memo’ again (Figure 22). The results appear in page order, nested under the name of each document (Figure 23). You can expand or collapse the list of results in a specific file by alternately clicking on the small arrow next to each result. As before, each search result includes some context (Figure 24).

This time, when we click on a hit on the results list Acrobat will open the document, showing exactly where the search term appears (Figure 25).

Next to the ‘New Search’ button at the top, there is a ‘Save results to file’ button (Figure 26). Selecting this button allows us to create a report in either PDF or CSV format. We recommend saving the results to PDF as this creates a nice summary of the results with links to the documents (Figure 27).