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Q: Old problem with Spotlight and Word .docx files

There is an old problem with Spotlight not finding Word .docx files.  You can find old discussions about this from 2008.  But despite this problem being ancient it has never been solved.

 

The essence of the issue is that Spotlight relies on a variety of software modules to index files.  Spotlight chooses the appropriate module to index each different type of file.  These indexing modules all have the file suffix .mdimporter.  There name of the module for indexing Microsoft office files is "Microsoft Office.mdimporter" and it can be found with some other .mdimporter modules at /Library/Spotlight/.  The"Microsoft Office.mdimporter" module has copyright info from Microsoft inside its package so we know who wrote it.  But this module is included with all new Macs by Apple.  Perhaps this is why this problem has never been fixed - the software is written by Microsoft but delivered by Apple.

 

The symptoms of the problem are that Spotlight will not find content in some .docx files.  It is not clear why it fails on some .docx files but not on others.  This problem does not seem to affect other Microsoft formats such as .doc, .xls, .xlsx, etc.

 

Given that Apple wants to sell Macs to business, and that businesses make heavy use of MS Office typically, one would think that this would have been a priority to fix.  But given that this problem is 7 years old and still unsolved I guess not.

 

Any suggestions on work-arounds would be welcome.

OS X Mountain Lion, latest release of OS X

Posted on Dec 7, 2015 11:09 AM

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Q: Old problem with Spotlight and Word .docx files

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  • by marco42,

    marco42 marco42 Sep 20, 2016 1:26 PM in response to fiberhome
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Sep 20, 2016 1:26 PM in response to fiberhome

    My problem may be more fundamental than fiberhome's. In my system/library/spotlight folder, there is no richtext.mdimporter file. In my regular (non-system) library folder, there is no spotlight folder at all. So two questions for anyone who is still following this thread and can help: (1) Where can I find richtext.mdimporter if it's not already in the spotlight folder, and, if I can find it somewhere, can I simply move it into the system/library/spotlight folder? (2) Should there be a spotlight folder in the regular library folder, and is there something seriously wrong if, as in my case, it's not there?

     

    If you get the impression that I don't know what I'm talking about, you're right! I just know that I'm deeply and persistently frustrated by my Mac's inability to index docx files.

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