[jamesa]

hi there,

I've just got a big dump of documents from work, and need to go back through them searching for very specific things. I thought spotlight would be great for this, but so far...

they're mostly word and powerpoint documents. I'm searching for documents that have specific words in their contents, but so far when I use the spotlight command the only thing it seems to find is documents with the word in their name.

now, please note because of space restrictions I've had to dump the documents into a hard drive outside my home folder (in case spotlight only indexes contents of documents in your own home folder). the other thing, I'd like to restrict the search by contents to documents only in the external hard drive. I'm having troubles doing this (when I do a find by contents, and only for the specific hard drive, it returns no results (briefly flashes the "thinking" widget before stopping, as if it's only searching the root directory. I know this is incorrect - there are results).

two questions then - how do I force spotlight to index the contents of an external drive, and how do I successfully get a find by contents search going that's recursive (i.e. searches every sub folder of a certain hard drive). so far I'm stumped.

thanks for any help!

-- james

[analogika]

Microsoft had advance copies of Tiger, and they were approached numerous times, but have failed/refused to write plug-ins for Spotlight.

Powerpoint and Word documents are not Spotlight-searchable, nor is Entourage mail.

Sorry.

Blame the ****tards in Redmond.

[jamesa]

umm

http://www.apple.com/ca/macosx/tiger/spotlight.html

that's not what apple are saying!

-- james

[jasong]

Word, PowerPoint, and Excel are all indexable by Spotlight. All versions, both Mac and Windows.

Now that we have the misinformation out of the way, let's solve your problem.

First thing, since you say the files are on an external drive, what filesystem is the external drive? I don't know if Spotlight works on non HFS-plus systems. Then lets make sure that the drive isn't on Spotlight's private list. Go to the Spotlight preference pane in System Preferences and click privacy. Make sure your the external disk isn't listed there, and also check to make sure the files aren't in a folder in the privacy list.

Assuming this isn't the case, the next thing I would try is re-adding the files to the Spotlight index. My favorite tool for this is Highlight http://homepage.mac.com/superpixel/ Open highlight and then drag the folder containing the files onto the Highlight window. If that still doesn't work, I would try rebuilding the Spotlight index. You may want to run this overnight as it will take quite a while. You can do this by adding your disk to the privacy tab of the Spotlight preferences, wait 5 minutes, and then remove it. Be sure to do this for all your hard drives, including the external one with the files in question on it.

Good luck.

[analogika]

Originally Posted by jasong

Word, PowerPoint, and Excel are all indexable by Spotlight. All versions, both Mac and Windows.

excel and word documents do appear to get indexed - you're right.

It's just Entourage that isn't indexed.

Sorry for the mix-up.

[jasong]

Yes they are. Something is wrong with your installation if they are not.

[analogika]

see edit - a second test confirmed that you are correct (apparently, I searched for the wrong keyword in the first test).

I revisited John Siracusa's article (where I thought I'd read that bit about office not being indexed), but he talks specifically about Microsoft dropping the ball on Entourage indexing.

[TETENAL]

Look at

/Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Office.mdimport

The copyright says "Microsoft Corporation" and the metatdata importer is bundled with Tiger. So it at least appears to be that Microsoft wrote this.

[Randman]

For a specific search like the OP wanted, one should use a regular search, Apple F, and specify the crtieria for the search (such as kind and PDF, for example).

[turtle777]

A good resource how to start and stop spotlight indexing via the terminal:

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/stopspotlightindex.html

-t