evening all,
aha! you say, vista does search within files automagically! not in my expirience.

the files that need to be searched, are excel 2007 files, so far so good. Held on a massive network share broken down into departments and access premissions given out as relevant. Not so good.

Vista won't index network drives. now, while it will look for names, it won't look within files for anything related to the search. This i assume is because it has no index on those files held on the network share.

WindowsXP didn't seem to care and would search within files it knew about anyway.

while i approve of not indexing network resources, why is it unable to search within the files it does find?
Both Coppernic and GoogleDesktop have prooven to be equally horrific if let loose in a datacentre.

any ideas on how to search within networked, nonindexed files?

Many thanks,

For searches of your entire system, you need to do an Advanced Search, not just a plain Search. Advanced Search has a myriad of options to allow you to search in all kinds of ways, --- probably far more than you could ever use (and doesn't require the use of the Index). See: How to Use the Advanced Query Language to Improve Windows Search Results

You can't go directly to Advanced Search. From anywhere in Vista, press the Windows Key + F (or go into the Start Menu, and from inside the Search pane, press F3).
That brings up the Search page - click the Advanced Search button to the far top-right, to open the Advanced Search Set Up page.
On the Set-Up page, check the 'Include non-indexed, hidden, and system files' option.
Under Location, select C Drive, or Computer, or Everywhere, (or whatever specific area you want to search) and in the Name box, fill in the name of the file you’re looking for, or some text from within the file.
If you want to narrow your search to one type of source (i.e. email, document, picture, music, other, at the top of the screen, go to Search Only and check which one of those categories you want to search. To do advanced screening, filtering, specialized kinds of searches etc. see the How to Use the Advanced Query Language to Improve Windows Search Results tutorial, and from approximately one-third of the way down the page (starting with the Advanced Search section), it goes into great detail of how to do those kinds of searches. I promise you that you will be amazed and surprised at what Advanced Search can do. It just takes a fair amount of time to familiarize yourself with all of the tons of different configurations.

(After this first search is completed, if it was only partially successful, do additional searches for any other key words you think might be associated with that file.) The search could take 20 seconds or 20 minutes, depending on how many files/folders there are to go through, but you'll eventually see extensive search results.

For searches within MS Office, either 1. open the Ribbon, select Home, Editing, and select either Find or Replace. Or, 2. you can put a Find icon or a Replace icon in your Quick Access Toolbar, for instant easy access to both functions.