Adobe Acrobat advanced search

I often find myself frustrated by the search function in Windows, and in Adobe Acrobat. I have a fix for Windows using FileSearchEX - a great piece of search kit which is so much more nuanced than the native Windows search (here). However, I constantly find myself stuck using Acrobat. There appeared to be no way to search for a word including spaces; for example, "etic". A 'normal' Ctrl & F search will get me empathetic, sympathetic, emetic, and so on. Even if I enter a space beforehand (e.g. " etic"), the Adobe search function ignores it. 

And then I discovered that there was a layer of search in Adobe Acrobat which I had not plumbed! There is an easy way to search for - for example - "etic" as an entire word, and not have "empathetic" show up time after time in Acrobat. All we need do is to use Advanced Search, which we open and start a search by keying Shift & Ctrl & F (Wright, 2020). 

This search allows us to tick the "whole word only" option which means when we are searching for "etic" we only get etic. Phew!

Sam

References:

Wright, E. (2020). How to Search Multiple PDFs with Adobe Acrobat’s Advanced Search. Erin Wright Writing. https://erinwrightwriting.com/search-multiple-pdfs/