DevonThink Pro Can't Search Content!

DEVONthink Tips
1

I just bought DevonThink Pro Office and DevonAgent in the bundle. I did not do a trial period, as I had used DevonThink Personal years ago, and I was confident that it would work as advertised.

I am quite shocked to find that I was wrong — it cannot perform the basic task I want to use it for.

I am writing a book, and have a massive collection of articles saved as .docx, .doc, and .pdf. I trashed the old database left over from my DevonThink Personal usage, and made a new one by indexing 1700 articles. They all showed up in the database. However, when I click on them, while I can see them (in tiny type, which I can’t seem to change), I cannot edit them. More importantly, DevonThink apparently can see into them. When I pick a word in the article and search for it, DevonThink can’t find it!

This means that I can’t do what I bought DevonThink for: Searching within this massive collection of articles.

I cannot find any mention of this problem in any of the forums or help pages or documentation.

Please help me fix this problem.

I am using a MacBook Pro, OSX 10.5.8.

2

Further trials show that search works for .ppt, .pptx, .doc and .rtf files, some .pdf files, but not .docx files — which is most of the collection.

It works on them if I convert them to .rtf files. But I have no desire to mass-convert over 1000 files just so DevonThink can read them properly.

What is the solution?

3

I’m running MS Office 11 for Mac under Lion here. DOCX documents are searchable in DEVONthink.

My guess is that you have an earlier version of MS Office installed, and the plugin to read/index text isn’t available on your computer.

4

Office2008 (12.3.0), OS10.6.8, DtPO (2.3) here. Content search with docx works.

Kind regards,
Bernd