Can't search inside Word 97 .doc files?

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gb2017
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Oct 17, 2017 11:27 pm

Can't search inside Word 97 .doc files?

Post by gb2017 »

Hello,

I've recently installed Everything as I have hundreds of Word 97 .doc files I wanted to go through but using Advanced Search for file content doesn't seem to work for them.

As a test I used Libreoffice to create two files - one .odt and one Word 97 .doc - and put the same word in each. I did an advanced search for this word and Everything found it in the .odt file but not the .doc file.

I've done a search around the forum and can't find anything about this. Is there something obvious I am missing here? Thanks.
gb2017
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Oct 17, 2017 11:27 pm

Re: Can't search inside Word 97 .doc files?

Post by gb2017 »

Well, I did the same test on my Win10 PC and that worked fine so there must be something weird about my Win7 machine. It just won't index inside my Word documents for some reason and consequently neither will Everything. I know I've set it up so that Windows indexes inside .doc files but even so, it has never worked. Never mind, it's an issue with my machine and not Everything that seems clear.
NotNull
Posts: 5458
Joined: Wed May 24, 2017 9:22 pm

Re: Can't search inside Word 97 .doc files?

Post by NotNull »

Off topic:
I'm a little surprised Everything is able to scan the contents of .DOC and .ODT files....

ODT files are container files (just like for example DOCX and XLSX files). Essentially it's a zip file containing mostly (XML) textfiles. Apparently Everything knows that this is a zip file and opens it. Don't think there is an (API) interface to call for that (there is also no preview for things like ODT files).

I vaguely remember that Office97 DOC files used Fast Saving (or a similar marketing-turbo name), which was basically saving delta's of the DOC file, like some sort of patches. That means that the order of the text in the document is not guaranteed to be the same as on the disk.

But ...
I created a DOC and ODT tstfile and sure, Everything was able to find the contents. Well done!
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