Is there a way to use a PowerShell command to get results from the various office documents as well? This server is almost all Word and excel files with a few PowerPoints.
When interacting with MS Office files, the best way is to use COM interfaces to grab the information you need.
If you are new to Powershell, COM will definitely be somewhat of a learning curve for you, as very little "beginner" documentation exists on the internet.
Therefore I strongly advise starting off small :
- First focus on opening a single Word doc and reading in the contents into a string for now.
- Once you have this ready, focus on extracting relevant info (The Powershell Match operator is very helpful)
- Once you are able to work with a single Word doc, try to locate all files named *.docx in a folder and repeat your process on them:
foreach ($file in (ls *.docx)) { # work on $file }
Here's some reading (admittedly, all this is for Excel as I build automated Excel charting tools, but the lessons will be very helpful for automating any Office application)
A useful document from a deleted link (link points to the Google Cache for that doc) - http://dev.donet.com/automating-excel-spreadsheets-with-powershell
Introduction to working with "Objects" in PS - CodeProject