Spotlight Search w/in all documents

Question

Level 1

8 points

Spotlight Search w/in all documents

Hi!

I have a user that migrated from a Windows machine a few years ago. We recently upgraded his Mac again. He used to successfully do a Windows search to find text within 20+ years of documents to successfully find how many times he has used certain phrases, etc.

Spotlight will do this, I know, but it appears to only do this for files opened on the current machine, and it seems to only be files within a certain timeframe. This functional need is very important to how he does his job.

How can we get Spotlight to:

Search for text within all documents (.doc, .docx, .rtf, .txt and Pages)
Regardless of the platform or machine that opened/created
Regardless of how old/how recently the file was opened, or modified, or created the file.

If spotlight does not do this, is there an App that does this well that is easy to use (think regular end user who does not understand UNIX commands)?

Thanks in advance for your help.

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.4), Spotlight Search

Posted on Jul 3, 2013 7:48 AM

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Answer 1

CT

Level 7

23,987 points

Jul 3, 2013 7:55 AM in response to acreason

Something to try:

Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes

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Answer 2

acreason Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 3, 2013 7:58 AM in response to CT

Thank you CT, but that does not make anything more effective in this case. The problem seems to be with the indexing. It does not seem to ever index anything not previously opened on that particular machine or keep that information long enough.

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Answer 3

nbar

Level 5

7,019 points

Jul 3, 2013 8:48 AM in response to acreason

I know you said no unix commands, but mdfind is an easy, straightforward command that will allow you to search not only names of documents/files/folders, but terms within them:

mdfind "text to search"

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Answer 4

Eric Root

Level 10

684,039 points

Jul 3, 2013 9:31 AM in response to acreason

Some other programs you can try.

Spotlight Alternatives

Alfred

EasyFind – Spotlight Replacement

Find Any File

Quicksilver

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Answer 5

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

Jul 3, 2013 10:05 AM in response to acreason

Search for text within all documents (.doc, .docx, .rtf, .txt and Pages)

It does that automatically, or it should.

Regardless of the platform or machine that opened/created

That's irrelevant, as long as the file type is supported. Unsupported types won't be searched by content.

Regardless of how old/how recently the file was opened, or modified, or created the file.

That's also irrelevant.

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Answer 6

acreason Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 3, 2013 10:53 AM in response to Eric Root

Eric,

Thanks! I had just installed EasyFind on his machine to see if that will help him. Something I noticed with that one is that it will also search network drives. It doesn't index at all, so it may take a while to search all his documents. I will respond again if that fixes the problem for him.

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Answer 7

acreason Author

Level 1

8 points

Jul 3, 2013 11:57 AM in response to nbar

nbar,

Thank you! I see how that works and it finds things very quickly. The user would have to open Terminal and then the It may be a bit cumbersome since he can't just click on the responses to just open any of those files, which he also does. If the user can't get EasyFind to do what he needs, I will see if he can search this way. He went to a Mac for look and feel and this option doesn't feel very easy. We have to make things easy for the end user.

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Answer 8

Barney-15E

Level 10

112,638 points

Jul 3, 2013 1:48 PM in response to acreason

acreason wrote:

nbar,

Thank you! I see how that works and it finds things very quickly. The user would have to open Terminal and then the It may be a bit cumbersome since he can't just click on the responses to just open any of those files, which he also does.

No need to use the command line. That is all available in the Spotlight search and searching in Finder. mdfind is just the command line tool that does the searching.

If the files are stored on external drives, then they would have to be indexed to search for content.

You seem to think it doesn't do what you want it to. Can you please explain the specific things that lead you to believe it won't do what you want?

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