Spotlight Doesn't Index Microsoft Documents

Same problem showed up when I "upgraded" to El Capitan

I've had this problem forever - ever since the .docx format first appeared.

Now on El Capitan, and still no fix!

It's hard for Apple to astound me these days, but it does astound me that there is no solution yet to Finder spotlight not indexing Office Documents, particularly MS Word Documents. But, in case anyone is watching, I have the same problem.

I copied the 2009 version of Microsoft Office.mdimporter into ~/Library/Spotlight, replacing the 2011 version that's been there since, I assume, 2011. (The 2009 version comes via the accumulated MS updates to Office 2004; the 2011 version via Office 2008.)

Forced a re-index, and IT WORKS!

(This is on an iMac running Office 2008 under El Capitan, so ymmv.)

I'm keeping a spare copy of the importer handy, in case it gets "upgraded" away by Apple or MS.

Weird update to the above "fix": docx files saved since I applied the fix are not being indexed.

Clearly they can be indexed - the mystery is in why they aren't.

Okay, so Spotlight is definitely broken in this regard. Let's all just acknowledge that we can't search .xls content. That being said, there's got to be a way to fix it, right? Surely, there's some sort of solution?

Anyone at Apple pay attention to this stuff?

I am having the same problem, Spotlight/finder not finding .docx files. Recently updated from 10.6 to El Capitan. at first the problem seemed to be limited to finding words or phrases within FOOTNOTES in word. Now it will not even find when I search on words that are in the body of a word document -- it finds some docx files, but not others. I called support and talked to a senior advisor, and he did not know how to solve the problem so elevated it to the engineers, even though the problem exists on his own (the advisor's) computer when he tried it as well.

Oddly, the spotlight/finder WILL find .doc files, or at least more often than it finds .docx files.

Apple, get your act together. This is the most BASIC function of a computer, and your latest and greatest operating system can't even handle it - ?

I have tried all sorts of things and none work reliably, including rebuilding the entire spotlight index (either through the spotlight pane in System Prefs or using sudo mdutil -E / from the terminal) or reindexing specific folders by setting them to private and not via the Spotlight pane in System Prefs. Stochastically, I can either find the content of individual .docx files or not. Huge pain as I have thousands of .docx files.

Yes, it is amazing that Apple has not fixed this problem. I do not understand--do some people not have this problem with El Capitan and docx? And if not, why do some of us have it and others not?

And why does it *sometimes* find documents and sometimes not?

Or, do people just give up quickly and use some other search program?

It is outrageous that an updated Mac can't even do a basic search on basic documents. It is making completing my book more time-consuming.

See if you can find the file(s) using one of these programs. If you go Finder/View/Show Path Bar, it will show you where it is located.

EasyFind – Spotlight Replacement

Find Any File

If you read all the posts, EasyFind doesn't solve the problem.

I have the very latest Sierra 10.12.1 and Spotlight still isn't indexing my .docx files! This is a huge problem.

Re-indexing doesn't work. The posts so far have been really helpful in troubleshooting this problem and putting it right at Apple's doorstep where it belongs.

It seems to have the exact same limitations as spotlight - totally fails to find my documents by content searches.

idontneedthisproblem

That's right. EasyFind doesn't work on Word docs. This discussion has been moved to a newer OS thread and ongoing. Go here: Spotlight fails to index Word docs, but Siri DOES!!