There are solutions suggested to make Spotlight search Word docs, but they date back to Mojave days. It appears that Spotlight is still searching only Mac apps in Ventura. Does anyone have current instructions for including Word in its searches?
MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 12.0
Spotlight has reserved words. One of those is kind. So I am saying restrict this Spotlight search to documents whose kind is Word (e.g. doc/docx) and find that quoted string in only that category of Word documents.
See: Narrow your search results on Mac - Apple Support
Simply entering a string without narrowing the search, or not having the right Spotlight category selected may not find anything, or everything that you don't want to see.
Verify that in your System Settings : Siri & Spotlight panel that you have selected the Documents Search Results category. If you haven't done so, do it now. Then click the Spotlight Privacy… button, and on that Privacy panel, drag and drop your Macintosh HD Desktop icon onto that window, wait ten seconds, select it, and click the [-] button to remove it. This will trigger a Spotlight indexing of your drive and this time, the Word documents will get indexed. Then my command examples will work on your Word documents.
Spotlight has reserved words. One of those is kind. So I am saying restrict this Spotlight search to documents whose kind is Word (e.g. doc/docx) and find that quoted string in only that category of Word documents.
See: Narrow your search results on Mac - Apple Support
Simply entering a string without narrowing the search, or not having the right Spotlight category selected may not find anything, or everything that you don't want to see.
Verify that in your System Settings : Siri & Spotlight panel that you have selected the Documents Search Results category. If you haven't done so, do it now. Then click the Spotlight Privacy… button, and on that Privacy panel, drag and drop your Macintosh HD Desktop icon onto that window, wait ten seconds, select it, and click the [-] button to remove it. This will trigger a Spotlight indexing of your drive and this time, the Word documents will get indexed. Then my command examples will work on your Word documents.
Don't have the Monterey box powered up just now, but Spotlight on Ventura 13.5 has no issue finding text passages in Word .doc or .docx documents — whether just saved from Word 16.75 or documents years older.
Let's say I have a Word document that contains a string "ANONYMOUS USER" in that case.
kind:word "anonymous user"
immediately finds that document. And let's say you are only interested in Word .doc files and not .docx:
kind:word -(.docx)
I'm afraid I'm not technical enough to know what you mean. Spotlight (the magnifying glass on the menu bar) opens a window. In that window I simply type the word string I'm looking for. I get a list of those phrases on everything but Word, even though I know I used it on Word. Where would I type "kind:word"?
Spotlight doesn't search Word docs