Search within pptx seems not working

DEVONthink
1

I have try to search content in pptx, and nothing showed.
And I can only search the title of the file.
I know i can convert it to a pdf, and ocr it.
But I dont want to duplicate files, and rather keep it in the original format.
So, is there a possible way to search content in pptx? or ocr this kind of format?
I have search the post around the forum, and has tried to rebuild the databases, which didn’t do the trick.
My setup: The latest macos Catalina, and devonthink 3 pro.

Best

2

Welcome @ChenZ

PowerPoint files are searchable if there is text in them. DEVONthink will not search images in the document. And no you cannot OCR a PowerPoint file.

Do note due to limitation of QuickLook, search terms will not be highlighted in the view/edit pane for these documents.

3

Thanks for your quick reply!
I now can search the content inside the pptx, and as you said, it can not be highlighted in the view pan.
Is there a better workflow to do the search inside pptx？
To transfer it to a pdf or other file format?
Or is there future plan/update to make a better way to show search result in pptx?

BTW, I tried searching in a webarchive. The file contains word “keeps”. When I search “keep” instead of “keeps” globally in the search bar, it shows no occurrences. But I can get good search result when i search in the view/edit pane. Why is that?

Best

4

There are no such plans currently, third-party file formats like this one are displayed via Quick Look which doesn’t support this.

By default the indexed-based toolbar search looks for complete words.

5

Thanks.

Can I set it not to search complete words in toolbar? or the only way in toolbar to fuzzy search is to use word like “~”?

6

Sure, all available operators and wildcards can be found in the help. ~ can be used to search for substrings.