Search Across Office and Document Files

Use Reader search when the question spans formats: find a policy term across reports, spreadsheets, presentations, PDFs, Markdown notes, and mail stores without writing one parser per file type.

Bound the search

$matches = Search-OfficeDocument -Path '.\Evidence' -Recurse `
    -Query 'Retention policy' -Extension docx,xlsx,pptx,pdf,md `
    -MaxDocuments 500 -MaximumResults 200 -MaxDegreeOfParallelism 4

Document, result, store-item, and concurrency limits are safety and predictability controls. Use -NoDocumentLimit, -AllResults, or -AllStoreItems only when the input scope is already controlled. Extension filters are applied before files consume the document ceiling.

The search-folder recipe searches a mixed .\Documents folder with one command and selects the useful result fields.

Use -IncludePageLocations when page-aware PDF or paged-document results matter. For downstream retrieval or indexing, continue with chunks and tables.