SEARCH ON CATEGORY OR KEYWORD IN DOCUMENT PROPERTIES

[carricka]

How can I search on a word(s) that have been entered in Category or Keywords
in Properties within Word in order to locate a document? There doesn't appear
to e anything with Explore or Search. Thanks.

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?Y2Fycmlja2E=?=,

> How can I search on a word(s) that have been entered in Category or Keywords
> in Properties within Word in order to locate a document? There doesn't appear
> to e anything with Explore or Search.
>

Which version of Word?

Cindy Meister
INTER-Solutions, Switzerland
http://homepage.swissonline.ch/cindymeister (last update Jun 8 2004)
http://www.word.mvps.org

This reply is posted in the Newsgroup; please post any follow question or reply
in the newsgroup and not by e-mail :-)

[carricka]

Cindy -

It's Word 2003 (11.5604.5606).

Thanks.

[Cindy M -WordMVP-]

Hi =?Utf-8?B?Y2Fycmlja2E=?=,

> It's Word 2003 (11.5604.5606).
>

Have you tried using File/Open; click Tools (top right) and choose Search; click the
Advanced tab?

> > > How can I search on a word(s) that have been entered in Category or Keywords
> > > in Properties within Word in order to locate a document? There doesn't appear
> > > to e anything with Explore or Search.
>

Cindy Meister

[BobW]

Cindy, If you don't mind my adding to this thread, I'm trying to do the same
thing and have tried what you suggest but no matter what I do, the search
yields no files found. I've been trying and testing this function for two
days and have never once gotten Advanced Search to detect ANY search
parameter involving file properites. Does it work for you?

Can't be too hard; I create a test doc in My Documents, choose
File\Properties, type the word "Linked" into the Comments, Category and
Keywords fields, click the Custom property tab and assign the word Linked to
the custom property named 'status.

Then I invoke Advanced Search, tell it where to look, specify that each of
these properties contains Linked, and ......no files are found.

What am i doing wrong?

[Richard Bacon]

Hi! It works for me! but i have had some oddities - like files I KNEW I had
created with a certain template had magically reverted to normal.dot!
sprinkled garlic round my PC and it now works perfectly!

HOWEVER...in older versions of Word, it was possible SAVE a search (very
useful if there are complex criteria eg all DOCS AUTHOR smith DATE Created
between a and B TEMPLATE minutes.

Word 2003 doesn't seem to have that feature - have I missed it or has it
gone?

Thanks
Richard Bacon
Wellington
New Zealand

[Scully134]

The search is not working for me at all.
I went into the properties box and input some CRAZY words in the Category,
Keywords and Comments section..i.e. puppylove, puppywag, etc....did an
advance search and the search found nothing. Help anyone? I am using 2003.
Thanks, Robin

[Rob Benz]

I have never been able to have anything be found by trying to use this
feature. I concluded that it was a non-feature that never worked. Now that
I've upgraded to Office 2007, the SEARCH option doesn't even appear anymore
in the file/open/tools dialog. How is a Word user supposed to perform
metadata-assisted search?
(question also for Cindy M, the Word MVP). Any help greatly appreciated.

[Graham Mayor]

The reasons it did not work in Word 2003 are:
That you did not tell the search engine *where* to look.
or
The document properties did not contain the searched data
or
When using the advanced search you did not add the search condition but
merely filled the three dialogs.
When all of the above are completed it should work just fine.

In Word 2007 the search function has been removed to the operating system.
Use the search tool in Windows Explorer to find any text in a file (which
includes the metadata).

--
<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>
Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com
Word MVP web site http://word.mvps.org

[Rob Benz]

Thanks, but that's not enough. The purpose of metatata tags (custom file
properties) is to allow documents to be tagged with a variety of different
identifiers so that people don't have to either cram all possible identifiers
into every file name (which is impractical for innumerable reasons) and
aren't limited to one logical folder hierarchy for categorizing files that
really need to be classified in several different ways.
Suppose I want to search all Proposal files generated in 2006 in Region 5
for any that involved Product A. Metadata search would enable me to establish
"2006" and "Region 5" and "Product A" as metadata tags, in proposal files
only. But even if I embed those values into the custom file properties of
certain documents, the new Windows Search would not only find those
particular documents, but it would also search all documents in the universe
that mention Product A in any way, in any context whatsoever, as well as
every document that has the digits "2006" anywhere in them, plus every
document that contains the word "Region", the digit "5", and the phrase
"Region 5"... bringing up thousands of irrelevant documents.
Unless I'm missing something, the new Windows Search doesn't let me specify
searching only the text within Word File Properties...so it's not much more
useful than Search Companion (except that it finds all that junk faster).

Acrobat Pro has a better system...it indexes all PDFs, but unlike windows
search, it not only finds and displays the file name; it also finds and
displays each occurrence of the search term within each document, and
displays those with surrounding text. And, if you click on an occurrence, it
opens the PDF of the .doc to the exact location and page, with the term
highlighted. If we are to depend on universal indexing of files for faster
search, we also need that kind of functionality to sort through the results.

[Graham Mayor]

Don't shoot the messenger :)
Word 2007 file format is XML - does it even have metadata?

[Rob Benz]

Sorry, Graham, didn't mean to sound like i was in attack mode. I'm just a
bit impatient with some of the things M'soft does - and doesn't - do.

Since Word docs still can contain file properties including custom file
properties, anything typed into those fields, IS metadata, stored somewhere
in the XML file structure.

There are document management systems on the market that make it very easy
and intuitive to define metadata when documents are created, and then perform
metadata field searches.

Sharepoint has a somewhat comparable capability to do this, but it's quite
tedious and unintuitive to set up and use.

[Graham Mayor]

Word docx format is in fact a zip file containing the elements of the
document XML construction. If you have WinRar open the document from WinRar
and have a dig in the files. With WinZip or other zip tools you will
probably have to rename the document to have a zip extension to enable the
tool to open it. WinRar does not have that limitation.

[Rob Benz]

Not sure what that all means with regard to searching for keywords...

[Graham Mayor]

The bottom line is that the search function has been removed from Word 2007
in favour of the search function in Windows Vista. As I don't use Vista you
will have to discover for yourself what facilities it has to search
documents. If you have Windows XP, you will have to make do with Windows
Explorer or maybe add Desktop Search.