I have an excel file on the desktop.
I have product codes inside the excel file.
When I do a product code search with Spotlight, I want it to search within this excel file. But it doesn't!
The old system does this search in leopard. But it doesn't on new systems. Anyone know your reason?
Spotlight assumes that with the unescaped minus sign, you want it to perform a subtraction, not a find of that string. Instead, narrow your search results by using:
kind:excel "35-20304143"
In this manner, you won't be asking Spotlight to search *all* filenames and their contents for that string, and focus it on just Excel files.
Spotlight assumes that with the unescaped minus sign, you want it to perform a subtraction, not a find of that string. Instead, narrow your search results by using:
kind:excel "35-20304143"
In this manner, you won't be asking Spotlight to search *all* filenames and their contents for that string, and focus it on just Excel files.
For security reasons, I do not download posted files. You should verify that your Excel columns containing those product numbers are set to text, that this is not a binary (.xls) Excel file, and that the file is local to your startup drive when performing the Spotlight search.
In System Preferences > Spotlight > Search Results, do you have Spreadsheets selected? That is key to indexing spreadsheets. You did not follow my instructions by double-quoting the string to be found in the Excel document.
I have an Excel .xlsx file on my Desktop and using the earlier syntax that I provided, I can identify the specific Excel document with that text string. I also just created another spreadsheet with your number examples, and Spotlight immediately found the document.
I do not have Excel installed to test this further. I do have LibreOffice 7.3, and using its Calc spreadsheet, I can set the format of one cell to text and another cell to general number.
As soon as I save this as an Excel 2007 - 365 .xlsx format, I can use Spotlight to find this specific .xlsx document using the following variety of Spotlight queries:
kind:excel 123
kind:excel 35
kind:excel "35-"
macOS 11.6.4
The forum won't let me add a link.
Can you download the excel file from the link in the picture and test it?
For example: 426-427-428nd rows, could you try please searching for numbers 52369192, 52369191,52369293
Let me ask a question: Spotlight/Finder is not able to search for numbers (fields which have a number format) in Excel?
If a put a number in a Excel field - such as "125" - Spotlight won't find it, even if I format it as "Text" within Excel app. However, if I modify the same field content to "125a", Spotlight will index (therefore it will be able to find it).
Is that so? If Spotlight cannot be taught to find those numbers in a number format, is there a workaround (some kind of macro to have Excel create text strings based on those numbers)?
Not work :(
Yes all my settings are correct.
Well, thank you for your help.
Excel file - word search in cell with spotlight.