Read and Inspect Word Documents

Use the Word read surface when the document already exists and the job is to understand it: inventory paragraphs and tables, locate terms, inspect links or controls, or decide whether a later update is safe.

Open read-only

Get-OfficeWord -ReadOnly returns a document that can be passed to the targeted Get-OfficeWord* commands, so the file is opened once even when several structures are inspected. Close it when finished.

$document = Get-OfficeWord -Path '.\Policy.docx' -ReadOnly
$document | Get-OfficeWordParagraph
$document | Get-OfficeWordTable
$document | Get-OfficeWordHyperlink
Get-OfficeWordStatistics -Document $document
Close-OfficeWord -Document $document

Find content deliberately

Use Find-OfficeWord -Text for literal text and -Pattern for regular expressions. The inspection family also covers fields, bookmarks, comments and revisions, footnotes and endnotes, images, content controls, tables of contents, and document properties.

The complete inspect-existing recipe creates a representative file, opens it once, and reports sections, paragraphs, tables, word count, and matches.

Choose the next step

• Use targeted updates when the structure should stay intact.
• Use merge and mail merge when several documents or data records produce the result.
• Use the cross-format Reader when the same search must include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Markdown, email, and other supported files.