In windows 11 indexing options → Advanced options - File types The docx file type is using a plain text filter which means I can’t search my docx documents created by Libre office. I have spent HOURS searching how to change this and the only suggestion I’ve found is to “reinstall office 365” I am using Libre office, so this suggestion is a non-starter. Help?
Hmm. Why do you think it’s wrong? What is your expectation?
LibreOffice itself doesn’t include a shell extension for DOCX content indexing. If no other applications installed on your system provide that, what should be there?
So you’re saying that unless I buy and install Microsoft Word, I will not be able to search for strings in my docx files? I don’t know what you mean by “shell extension”, but my expectation is that I should be able to search docx files and I cannot. In the process of trying to figure out why, I came across the “plain text” thing that seems to be the logical explanation.
You cold save your documents as .odt instead of .docx
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You may use the convert options of LibreOffice to generate additional .odt files.
My expectation would be Microsoft to move all this in Copilot.
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But usually computers just ignore user-expectations…
There are a couple of third party indexers that can look inside popular file formats, see this page that has a couple listed I use these 5 free tools to search files on Windows 11, and they are a lot better than Windows Search
Personally, I don’t use Windows Indexer for resource reasons. I don’t search inside files but use Everything and logical file and folder naming if I need to find files.
I tried 3 of the 5 suggested search tools above and none of them correctly search the contents (not file names) of a docx file. That said, after finally figuring out that the correct search term is “ifilter”, I found the solution to my issue. It is to download and install the Microsoft Office 2010 filter packs: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17062&msockid=21c51c09df0663e627de09bbdef662f5 This fixed my problem and I’m now able to search the contents of docx files using the built-in windows search tool.
Thank you for sharing your solution.