Z won't Index a Word attachment

I saved a webpage to the center column of Zotero by pressing "Create New Item From Current Page". I right clicked on that item, hovered on "Add Attachment" in the box that comes up, and then clicked on "Attach Stored Copy of Fiie" in the box that comes up to the right of that box. Then, in the "Select a File" box that comes up I selected a 1.6 MB Word 2007 file from my thumb drive.

Everything works fine. The newly attached Word document opens quickly when I press the Zotero right-column "View File" button. This Word document has a Table of Contents and that works fine too. When I click on any of the TOC headings, it goes immediately to the proper target in the body of the document. The Word 2007 "Find" command works also, within the Word document.

However, Zotero won't index the file. It says "Indexed: No" in the right Zotero column. I press the double green arrow beside "Indexed: No" and nothing happens other than the Note section below the double green Indexing arrow stutter-stepping for a split second.

Is this normal, that Zotero won't index a Word document? I attached another, smaller (16kb), Word document to the same Item and it doesn't Index either. I also dragged each Word attachment to other Items to see if that would help and it didn't.
  • Is this normal, that Zotero won't index a Word document?
    Yes. Zotero doesn't currently index Word documents. (There are existing threads on this if you do a search.)
  • you can convert a .doc file to a pdf (either in Word/Ooo or using one of the countless online file converters), which Zotero will index.
  • edited February 4, 2010
    Thanks very much. I did do a number of searches before resorting to posting and I've just done another couple after reading your replies. I'll continue looking because for some reason I can't find these threads. I would like to become familiar with the ins and outs of Zotero indexing.

    By the way, in my travels around the web tonight experimenting with pdf's and docx's and how they relate to Zotero, I noticed Google Docs has dramatically improved its Search, which up to very recently was abysmal. Docs now searches all its document formats very nicely - although not perfectly - from the main Search box, with no individual documents open. It will find word fragments, even in pdf's, listing all documents in which your search string occurs. You must open documents individually then and search again within them to find individual occurrences.

    In pdf's it yellow-highlights each hit and goes from one to another by pressing Enter. It changes the highlighting from yellow to pinkish-orange (at least on my screen) for the current hit. It gives you a count of your hits and which one is curently highlighted, such as "3 of 19".

    I said it's "not perfect" because some searches I tried it just wouldn't find, although it would find others equally difficult. It seemed to have trouble with some less-than-four-character strings, for example, but not all.

    That's just my first impression, but it's heartening enough that now I'm off to see if Gmail may have improved its Search as well, which would have to come up from equal depths as (the former) Docs.
  • Hi, It would be great if it indexed word docs too. The Z builtin editor is very limited, so I wanted to use Word for my notes. But then without indexing I would need to convert from notes to PDF.

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