EasyFind: zero (or incomplete) search results

Miscellaneous Needful things
1

Hi all, I searched the forum but didn’t see any posts about my problem.

EasyFind has been working perfectly for me up until a couple of days ago. Now, for some reason, it fails to return results for file contents in certain new folders. These folders are contained in the Dropbox folder on my MacBook, 5-6 folder levels deep. EasyFind has always returned perfect results for all other files in my Dropbox, some of which are just as deep, and continues to do so today. I tried a test of copying the relevant folders to my desktop and searching the file contents there, but I get the same outcome: zero results.

An example of my problem is the word “otter,” which I know for a fact appears numerous times in many of the 89 files in these folders, but “0 found/89 done” is the result. A search for “and” or “but” will find two or three files, but all of the 89 files in the affected folders undoubtedly have those words in them.

All of my settings are correct, the same as usual. I can’t figure out what is going on. Does anyone have any ideas? I don’t enjoy unresolved mysteries of this kind. :cry:

I certainly don’t mind having to pay for DEVONsphere Express (and perhaps I will have to), but EasyFind has always been perfectly adequate for my needs, and up until now has worked flawlessly for me.

2

What has or may have changed on your machine?

Could you provide more information about these “new folders”?

EasyFind has not been updated, so this points to some other cause.

3

Thanks for your reply, BLUEFROG.

Nothing has changed on my machine that I know of. I did upgrade Dropbox to a larger storage size a few weeks ago, but I can’t imagine why that would matter.

The new folders are just regular folders that I created with Finder. They contain Microsoft Word documents.

4

You cna’t search the contents of Word documents. It is a format opaque to EasyFind.

5

Thanks, BLUEFROG. I believe you, but that definitely hasn’t been my experience. EasyFind has always searched all of my Word docs perfectly up until this problem appeared a few days ago. Anyway, I have purchased DEVONsphere Express, so I guess/hope this won’t be an issue going forward.

6

It depends very much on the Word files. If the file contains the searched phrase in its raw code, then you can find it, e.g. when you use the Phrase operator.