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Spotlight Hijacked!

P

Paulinderwick

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 8, 2011
9
0
I am mystified - having owned various macs since 1991 I thought I was familiar with most quirks of the system but... Spotlight on my MacBookPro (10.7.2 2.7ghz Intel Core i7) will only return Office documents - powerpoint, word etc and does not indicate any keynote presentations although I have literally hundreds (if not thousands I am a lecturer using Keynote every day of the week). Help! I've tried turning off the restart feature, looked at log-in features, tried to get rid of Microsoft Document Connection (a prime suspect) but it keeps coming back and still Spotlight refuses to return any document except one created in Office.:confused:
 
Nope!

Just tried that, didn't work, then tried it again restarting between each addition and removal from the list - it still returns Office documents from versions back to 2004 and before as well as Office 2011.:confused::confused:
 
I rarely use Spotlight, preferring to use Finder, as it gives more search options and control.
 
Tried that too!

Many thanks for the suggestions so far, I tried Easyfind which looks promising but I need to find words and names in slides in Keynote and Easyfind couldn't do it or so it seems. Still doesn't adress the mystery though - why is Spotlight only returning documents created in Office???:confused::confused::confused:
 
Paulinderwick said:
Many thanks for the suggestions so far, I tried Easyfind which looks promising but I need to find words and names in slides in Keynote and Easyfind couldn't do it or so it seems. Still doesn't adress the mystery though - why is Spotlight only returning documents created in Office???:confused::confused::confused:
Click to expand...
I've never had Spotlight return as many search results as Finder does. It appears to only show top results, but not all. As to why it finds Office docs and not iWork, I don't know. It certainly isn't because it's been "hijacked". I rarely use it, as it produces incomplete results with no additional filtering options.
 
It's a new problem

Until last week (the last time I used Spotlight) it worked fine, gave me on a search for a name, a case term, a technical term, all of the documents which contained that term, it was fantastic - but it has been hijacked - no iWork documents at all!!!!
 
Paulinderwick said:
Until last week (the last time I used Spotlight) it worked fine, gave me on a search for a name, a case term, a technical term, all of the documents which contained that term, it was fantastic - but it has been hijacked - no iWork documents at all!!!!
Click to expand...
It hasn't been "hijacked". There's no such thing.
 
Good Heavens No!

I'm a tax lecturer so have to review cases on appeal from earlier years, so whilst preparing a presentation I want to find the earlier slides on the case at an earlier appeal stage, copy it into the current presentation and then update it. At the moment I have to use an older computer which has the older files on as well - that's running SL not Tiger - and Spotlight works fine - gives me the files the term is in, then I have to switch computers to find that file in the MacBookPro, open the file, extract the slides and copy into the current presentation. But why does Spotlight only find Office documents. I have spent hours searching systems prefs, office prefs, restarting, tearing my hair (what's left of it) out.
 
Paulinderwick said:
But why does Spotlight only find Office documents. I have spent hours searching systems prefs, office prefs, restarting, tearing my hair (what's left of it) out.
Click to expand...
Why do you continue to insist on using Spotlight, when better options have already presented to you, such as Finder or EasyFind?
 
Missing the point...

You may find Easyfind easier - and if you are looking for a file, rather than content, it probably is, but Spotlight, for me, has been great, it searched in exactly the way I wanted it to and gave me the results I was looking for. I have tried the easyfind program, but Finder? the Find instruction in Finder uses Spotlight to search, so again, just gives me Office documents. When I tried EasyFind, even set to examine File Contents it only examined Office files as far as I can see. Spotlight gives me immediate results whilst EasyFind I am sat waiting whilst it searches for the term. It is doing it as I speak - a term which Spotlight will find instantly (just in the wrong type of files) EasyFind is still looking for. It just stopped looking in Filecontents for a word which I know must be in 50 or 60 different documents and - it didn't find it having given the message "0 found/175187 done" whatever that may mean.

The same term in Spotlight finds 6 powerpoint presentations, 5 word documents, and 4 pdfs instantly. EasyFind is easier???

Am I the only person in the world with this glitch?
Is there a cure?
Why don't people realise that what works for them might not work for everyone else?
 
Where exactly are the files located that you're not finding in searches? What's the file path?
 
Filepath

The Folders are sitting on the desktop of the new machine, both the Office files which Spotlight can find, and the iWorks files which it seemingly refuses to. Thanks for sticking with this.
 
Paulinderwick said:
The Folders are sitting on the desktop of the new machine, both the Office files which Spotlight can find, and the iWorks files which it seemingly refuses to. Thanks for sticking with this.
Click to expand...
What happens when you use Finder to search for a file directly in the Desktop folder?
ScreenCap 1.png​
 
Paulinderwick said:
The Folders are sitting on the desktop of the new machine, both the Office files which Spotlight can find, and the iWorks files which it seemingly refuses to. Thanks for sticking with this.
Click to expand...

Are all the appropriate boxes checked off in System Preferences - Spotlight


RoZno.png
 
I'm not sure if re-indexing the way the Apple KB article states deletes the current index, or just refreshes it. Perhaps there's something wrong with your index. Destroying the index and starting fresh might maybe help. Maybe.

There's two ways to do this. You can delete the /.Spotlight-V100 directory, or, a little friendlier, in a terminal, you can

Code: 
mdutil -E /

According to the man page, that should, "...cause each local store for the volumes indicated to be erased. The stores will be rebuilt if appropriate."

Which sounds pretty definite to me. I don't think you need to be root, but if it yells at you, just put sudo before the command.

I'm not super confident that this will help, but it can't hurt anything. Other than the time spent waiting for the re-index to finish.
 
Good morning all

Back in the land of the awake I started up the MacBook Pro - and it's just like it was yesterday.

For those who posted whilst I was asleep - yes all boxes are checked in Spotlight prefs, and presentations comes first - searching in Finder has exactly the same result as searching in spotlight - aren't they using the same process to search? I can't imagine Apple have two completely separate search facilities.

I am still only getting Word/Powerpoint/PDFs - No iWork files at all, but they are there on the desktop, in fact one is open as I speak.

I rarely use the command line stuff and haven't at all in recent years - how do I access it to eliminate the file as suggested?
:confused::confused::confused:
 
Paulinderwick said:
Back in the land of the awake I started up the MacBook Pro - and it's just like it was yesterday.

For those who posted whilst I was asleep - yes all boxes are checked in Spotlight prefs, and presentations comes first - searching in Finder has exactly the same result as searching in spotlight - aren't they using the same process to search? I can't imagine Apple have two completely separate search facilities.

I am still only getting Word/Powerpoint/PDFs - No iWork files at all, but they are there on the desktop, in fact one is open as I speak.

I rarely use the command line stuff and haven't at all in recent years - how do I access it to eliminate the file as suggested?
:confused::confused::confused:
Click to expand...

I got Office 2011 for my wife for 10 bucks through our company "home use" program and regretted installing it. First it wiped out fonts needed by Libre Office and second it associated itself with all Office docs, including ones I would rather open with Libre Office or Numbers. I never saw so much clutter in the Dock. There must have been 8 icons down there, all auto installed, 3/4 of them useless.

When her hard drive got wiped, taking with it my only copy of the Office install dmg and the associated activation files, I was greatly relieved when she didn't ask me to install it again. For us, MS software is something we can live without on our Macs. There was another problem as well. Recovery from the wiped HDD involved (at Apple's prodding) installing the original OS which included an Office 2004 Trial. Weeks later when I though her Mac was running fine under Lion, she received an email attachment that was somehow associated with Office 2004 and it caused a popup that read "You can't run PPC apps under OS X Lion" or something like that. I dragged Office 2004 to the trash and the association was pointing to Libre Office like it should. No I don't need or want anything from MS on my Mac. If you need Office, then by all means figure this out. If you don't need it, a quick drag of Office 2008 to trash and a lot of problems get dragged to trash along it.

yawns said:
Ah, ignore what I wrote previously. Try this instead:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/15802152#15802152
Click to expand...

This might explain a lot. Perhaps the corruption of Spotlight's index was caused by Office and perhaps not but your link points to a possible remedy.
 
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