I have a few thousand excel files located in various subfolder inside one large folder. They are all shared workbooks. I am trying to locate every instance of a particular string of text in these files, or at least a list of every file that contains the string (I'm expecting at most a few dozen, so I can just open them and ctrl+f at that point).

I've tried using the Windows search function and inputting the string I'm looking for in the "word or phrase in the file" field, but I get no results. Through some trial and error I've discovered that Windows ignores shared workbooks for the purposes of this type of search. I need a way to either:

a. Get Windows (or some other program - I've tried Agent Ransack and it doesn't return results either) to stop ignoring shared workbooks or
b. Run some kind of mass edit that will unshare all the workbooks. I've tried copying the files but the copies just end up as shared themselves.

I'm running Windows XP Professional Version 2002 and Excel 2003.

Thanks in advance!