Windows 10 File Explorer Search for Excel File

Question

Our company has a standard costing excel sheet. The sheet has been through many revisions. There is a revision tab within the spreadsheet. I believe we had a problem with an old revision and I want to find all the projects that used that revision. So I am looking for revision A3.2.0, not A3.1.9 (these are just samples). While using windows search, it kept returning odd results. So I took a subset of files into a single folder and started playing with windows explorer search.

Using the windows explorer search, I entered "Ext:xls AND content:A3.2.0"

I still got odd results, so I started paring down the content of my test files: 1) removed all tabs other than the revision 2) removed all columns other than the actual revision column (removed date, person, description)

Still odd results. Now it is time to define odd. Files show up in my results that do not include "A3.2.0"

So then I started whacking away at the rows of listed revisions. Finally getting down to two rows/revisions: "A2.2.0" & "A3.0.0". Still, it appears in my search results. So I created a new excel file from scratch and manually entered the values:

• '[Manually created.xlsx]Sheet1'!$A$1: A2.2.0
• '[Manually created.xlsx]Sheet1'!$A$2: A3.0.0

Do my search: "ext:xls AND content:A3.2.0" and the file appears as a result. If I remove either entry, the file does NOT appear in the search results.

This makes no sense - any help would be greatly appreciated.