Why is apple spotlight not finding contents of docx?

Question

Currently, spotlight will only search the title of docx files, not the contents. Is there any way to fix this?

Answer 1

Yes there is a way. My answer is based on this discussion in Apple Communities. My summary:

There are two spotlight importers for Office documents.

• /Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Office.mdimporter

• /System/Library/Spotlight/RichText.mdimporter

Both are included in MacOS and the Microsoft Office importer has been updated in recent MacOS updates (I have checked 10.12.4 and 10.12.5).

By default, when Word changes a document the MS importer is used. And that is where the problem lies! The Apple importer works correctly.

You can see your documents appearing and disappearing in Spotlight searches by doing these two commands:

$ mdimport -d1 [path to docx]

That uses the system default importer /System/Library/Spotlight/RichText.mdimporter and the document appears in Spotlight.

$ mdimport -d1 -g /Library/Spotlight/Microsoft\ Office.mdimporter [path to docx]

And the document disappears from Spotlight.

Solutions to the problem:

1. Write a script which you run every hour to reindex any new .docx
2. Delete the Microsoft provide importer /Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Office.mdimporter

I have deleted the Microsoft importer. And I must remember to delete it after every Office update.

Warning: If you do delete the Microsoft importer, Spotlight no longer indexes the content of Excel files!

Please note I am not happy with this answer. I have copied the Microsoft Office importer from my MacBook (where indexing has been working correctly) to my desktop (where it has been failing) and now all new or modified documents are indexed correctly. Both are running 10.12.5. And both give architecture mismatch errors when documents are indexed by mdimport in Terminal.

Answer 2

From what I read in here, and on Apple communities, I understood that the problem is that /Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Office.mdimporter is used to index docx files, which it doesn’t properly handle. Removing the importer fixes the problem, but breaks old Word (.doc) and Excel file indexing. Explicitly calling mdimport also does, but has to be done each time file is modified. I am not sure how Spotlight decides, which importer to use to handle specific file types, but in the info.plist for the misbehaving Microsoft mdimporter I found a mention of docx. I made a backup copy of the Info.plist, removed the array element describing docx (…):

    <dict>
        <key>UTTypeConformsTo</key>
        <array>
            <string>public.data</string>
        </array>
        <key>UTTypeDescription</key>
        <string>Microsoft Word document</string>
        <key>UTTypeIdentifier</key>
        <string>com.microsoft.word.openxml.document</string>
        <key>UTTypeTagSpecification</key>
        <dict>
            <key>com.apple.ostype</key>
            <string>WXBN</string>
            <key>public.filename-extension</key>
            <array>
                <string>docx</string>
            </array>
            <key>public.mime-type</key>
            <string>application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document</string>
        </dict>
    </dict>

and saved. However, newly created or edited docx files were still not searchable by spotlight. I wasn’t sure the changes I made were noticed by spotlight, so I rebooted my Mac, still the same. Finally I changed the modification date on the mdimporter (touch /Library/Spotlight/Microsoft\ Office.mdimporter). After this the docx files I create and modify are promptly indexed automatically. I am not sure whether this solution will last and if it will survive software updates.