FIND A WORD IN PDF: WINDOWS, MACOS, ANDROID, IOS - DOUBTS - 2025

The search for words in PDF is something that we must know on any platform, since when the documents are very long and we want to locate a word or phrase without having to read all the text, it is necessary to know ways to do it.

The first thing you should know is to open a document in PDF format (PDF stands for Portable Document Format, for its acronym in English) you need to download special applications. The most common types of files can be converted to PDF format, as they are designed to be easily exchanged between users.

Why use PDF files? There are many reasons. These documents are much lighter than a Word document and their graphical interface is fluid because it is a design intended for reading. We must know that these files treat the information in it as if it were an image (that's why it is fast).

PDF documents have an intelligent search engine integrated, which will efficiently find what we are looking for.

Windows

To open PDF documents on your computer, you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader DC installed. In case you don't have it, we invite you to follow the following steps:

Install Adobe Acrobat Reader on Windows

1- Download the software installer by clicking here.

2- We uncheck all the boxes that are marked and press «Install now».

4- An.exe file will be downloaded, which we must click and select open.

5- When doing so, a window will open where we must press «Execute».

6- Then we press yes when it asks us for permission to install a new application. The program will be installed; once this is done we can open our ".pdf" files.

Windows 10

To perform the search, the first thing we are going to do is open the document. Once open we are going to press the Ctrl + F keys on our keyboard.

A window will open in the upper right side of the program.

In that box we write the word or phrase to search and press «Next». Adobe Acrobat Reader will search through our entire document and highlight the matches to our search.

The next and previous buttons can be used to move from one match to another, in the event that the word or the match of words are found more than once.

MacOS X

On Mac we must also have an application installed to be able to view PDF documents; In the event that we do not have it installed, we must follow the following steps:

Install Adobe Acrobat Reader DC on Mac

1- Download the.dmg file from here.

2- We click on «Install now».

3- Once downloaded, we double click on the file that was downloaded.

4- A window will open where we double-click on "Install Adobe Acrobat Reader DC", and then confirm if we want to open the file.

5- We click on finish and we will have the program installed.

MacOS

We must open the PDF document with Adobe Acrobat Reader; once opened we must press the keys command + F.

A search box will open in the upper right part of the document, here we must enter the word or phrase that we want to search for and click on «Next».

IOS

We start the iBooks application on our iPhone or iPad.

We locate the file we want to open in our library:

When we open it, a menu will be shown at the top, where we must select the magnifying glass.

In doing so, we can write the word or phrase we want to search for and then press "Search" on the keyboard.

Android

The first thing we must bear in mind is that to open PDF documents on our Android device we must have installed an application that allows us to open files with the extension ".pdf".

The first thing you should do is check if your device has an application designed for this, such as OfficeSuite + PDF Editor. In case you don't have it, open Play Store and type OfficeSuite + PDF Editor.

When selecting it, you click "Install".

You press «Accept».

We hope the program will download and install automatically.

Once the download is complete, we click on «Open».

It will load the main page of the program, and since it is the first time we will open it, it will ask to read the privacy policies and its own internal rules (EULA).

If we agree with everything written there, click "Accept and continue."

It will show us the main window of the application that we downloaded. Once there we click on «PDF».

It will load a window similar to the previous one, we click on «Browse».

We select the folder where the file to be opened is located.

The document that we have selected will open, and we must click on the editing pencil that is below.

Then we go to the home tab and select "Search" (step 1 and step 2).

A navigator bar will open at the top, where we will write the word or phrase we want to search for. The application will shade all the matches it finds in the document you have open. To review each of these, you just have to press the left or right key that is shown in the search bar.

Frequent questions

What if we want to do more complex searches on Windows and Mac OS?

If you already have the PDF document open with Adobe Reader, you must press the Ctrl + Shift + F keys (If it is Windows).

For Mac OS, press Shift + command + F.

A window with wider options should appear to perform the search:

References

1. Adobe Acrobat Reader (No date) Taken from: get.adobe.com.
2. Open PDF files in Acrobat Reader (No date) Taken from: adobe.com.
3. ADOBE ACROBAT READER DC (no date). acrobat.adobe.com.
4. Google Play - Store (No date) Taken from: play.google.com.
5. Information about PDF (no date). Consulted from: es.wikipedia.org, on 06-20-2018.
6. How to find text within a book or PDF with iBooks for iPhone and iPad (No date). Recovered from: comoiphone.com
7. Apple Team (January, 2018). Mac keyboard shortcuts. Taken from: support.apple.com
8. HELP FROM ADOBE® ACROBAT® READER DC (April, 2015). Taken from: helpx.adobe.com
9. First steps with iBooks (March, 2018). Recovered from: support.apple.com
10. How to find a word in a PDF (no date). Taken from: es.ccm.net