Spotlight vs. Microsoft Word

I have been doing some tests to try to learn why Spotlight sometimes fails to find words in the contents of Microsoft Word .docx files. I’ve published some results from running a particular sequence of steps that on several Macs has exhibited the bad search results here: https://github.com/jafingerhut/osx-spotlight-test/blob/master/doc/README-test-sequence.md

Perhaps more importantly, I am hoping to convince people to vote on this issue on a Microsoft web site, in hopes that someone there will take a deeper look into the issue and fix it: https://word.uservoice.com/forums/304942-word-for-mac/suggestions/10998114-apple-s-spotlight-can-t-find-word-docx-files

Just click on the Vote button there. It only asked me for an email address in order to have my vote counted, and in the last week I do not believe I have gotten any new spam because of it (nor any email at all because of voting, that I can tell).

Andy

I had some Spotlight indexing and search tests that were failing for Microsoft Word .docx files on all systems I tried it on.

I tested them again on macOS Mojave, and also looked at the contents of Apple’s RichText Spotlight mdimporter, and it appears that they made a change that I had been testing that I think may fix the problem. Mojave may help you more successfully use Spotlight to find Word .docx files via words contained within the document! Yay!

https://discussions.apple.com/message/33919531

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