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I just noticed that Spotlight is not finding text in Pages or Numbers documents. It's working on most everything else (.pdfs, Mail, Contacts, Evernote, OmniOutlines, etc.).
I do have Documents checked in Spotlight preferences.
Is there some reason Spotlight is not working on iWork files? And if not, what can I do about this?
MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)
You may need to reindex your mac, Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes - Apple Support
Thanks - I'll try that
Every one of my Pages '08, '09, and v5 Pages documents show the first page contents in Spotlight when passing a mouse over their names. If you have a document that begins with a blank page, the blank page will be shown, contributing to the belief that Spotlight isn't seeing that document.
In the spotlight search window, use this search feature: kind:Pages
If you want to see the path to the given file, press and hold the command key in Spotlight while the document content is displayed.
I have re-indexed, and still do not get Pages or Numbers docs showing up in Spotlight. Very odd.
Anything else I can try?
Thanks for the reply, but my problem isn't that documents are showing up in the Spotlight search but have blank first pages. The names of the docs are not showing up in the search at all.
I had a weird result from using "kind:Pages", however.
I tried looking in Spotlight for a search string that I knew existed in one Pages doc: "xxl200". Spotlight said "no results".
So I erased "xxl200" from the search field and started typing in "find:Pages", and the search results showed the Pages doc I was looking for, even though the search string "xxl200" was not in the search field.
What's the proper syntax for using "find:Pages"? Does it get entered before the search string, as in "Find:Pages xxl200"? Or is there some punctuation or spacing I'm not doing right? This is moderately frustrating.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Roger,
I have a Pages v5.5.2 document on my desktop. The first paragraph of the Invisible Man contains "wintry day."
In Spotlight, I can simply search for "wintry day" and it finds the above Pages document. It also finds the source Word .docx document that contains more of that story. If I didn't care about the search scope, I could live with the results of just a "wintry day" query. To be more specific, and confine my search to just Pages documents, the Spotlight query would be:
"wintry day" kind:Pages
which more accurately only returns the single Pages document match. If I replace Pages with Word, then I only see the related .docx document.
Interesting. I created a new Pages doc on my desktop with that search string, and Spotlight immediately picked to up. But it's not picking up any in my Documents folder. I've tried re-indexing that folder several times, and it doesn't fix it. Very weird.
I have a two-column Pages document in a sub-directory of Documents. At random, I selected the following text from this file:
"columns are 250 pt with a 16 pt gutter."
When I supplied this quoted string to Spotlight, it instantly found that single document.
Spotlight does not find content in Pages
