Doesn't spotlight search contents of files?

Hi, Mary,
Join the growing crowd of dissatisfied Tiger/Spotlight users.

Spotlight seemingly will only search within Word documents created with certain versions of Word, and then only if the extension ".doc" is added. Adding the extension to documents created with some versions of Word will not be indexed unless you open and Save the document; for me, that is totally unacceptable, as I need to retain the create date.

For the EndNote document, I don't have an answer (but, then again, no one else seems to either; look around this site and you'll find many, many other users with similar experience). I, too, experienced it-once too often, which is why:

I switched to Tiger because of Spotlight. I switched back to Panther because of Spotlight.

Sorry I can't be of more help, but Apple's got to get involved with this, and the sooner the better. They're losing credibility every day.

HI, Mary.

You wrote:

" I am searching for a file by its contents, specifically, a phrase..."

Spotlight does not support phrase search. While some think it does, it does not. The facilities in Search Kit, which performs the content indexing and searching for Spotlight, for phrase support are not enabled in Spotlight's indexing setup. If you search for a phrase, e.g. blue moon, it will find documents containing both blue and moon. If one of the results contains the phrase, it is purely because the document contains both words, not because it contains the phrase.

You wrote:

"I am looking for documents saved in the program EndNote...Does it only search certain file types? If so, am I able to add other file types to this selected list?"

Spotlight only searches what it can index, unless the search argument is a Raw Query consisting only of File System Metadata.

Spotlight can only index documents for which it has associated Spotlight Plug-ins.

If the format of End Note documents does not conform to the types of documents for which Spotlight plug-ins are installed on your computer, it will not index those documents, hence it will not find them in search, specifically a search for their contents.

A check of both Apple's list of third-party Spotlight plug-ins and the EndNote Web Site indicates there is no Spotlight plug-in available for EndNote documents. You should contact the EndNote folks to ask if they are planning to develop a Spotlight plug-in for their product.

Note that some of the information above is from the "Spotlight" chapter of my book, Troubleshooting Mac® OS X, Tiger Edition.

Good luck!

😉 Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X

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PM G5 Dual 2.3GHz, iBook 700, more! Mac OS X (10.4.3)

If you are using EndNote v. 9.0, it does have a Spotlight plug-in. Info from the EndNote site can be found here. Sorry I cannot help as to why Spotlight is not locating what you are looking for in the EndNote database.

Actually, I do have a couple of suggestions (assuming that you are using EndNote v. 9.0). First, make sure that the EndNote folder containing the application is in your "Applications" folder as the Spotlight plug-in will not work if it is located elsewhere. Also, you need to turn on Spotlight indexing for all the EndNote databases that you wish to search via Spotlight. This is done with the "Preferences>Libraries>Enable Spotlight Support" option within EndNote 9.0.