Indexing

I was doing an experiment this morning to see about using EF to find slides for reuse. I was unsuccessful in my searches for terms on interior slides of briefings using a new library. However, when I used a pre-existing EF library, I succeeded. How long does indexing take and is there any way to know its status or to stimulate its progress?

Example: I created a two-slide briefing and entitled the second slide Jones. I also tagged the briefing with Jones. If I searched records for Jones, nothing came up. This was after, say ten minutes rather than ten hours.

Unless there’s a backlog, indexing should only take a few seconds. It happens automatically almost immediately after modifying a file within EagleFiler and when opening a library. Every few hours, EagleFiler scans the files in case any have been modified outside of EagleFiler. You can force indexing of a particular file by viewing it in EagleFiler. Indexing is suppressed if you are currently importing into the library. You can monitor the progress in the Activity window.

Tag searches do not rely on indexes, so that should always work. However, you may be running into this bug.

Michael

Yes, I was bit by the tag-related bug you mention. I changed the tag to “jones” instead of “Jones” and was immediately able to find the file in question. Thanks.

As for searching for words in the slides’ text (but not file name), I was still not succeeding with the “new” library after hour or two, but then began to find things. I did a new experiment–putting “Smith” as the title of a second slide of a two-slide briefing. I did not find the file by searching on “Smith,” even after quitting and reopening EagleFiler. This situation has persisted for more than an hour.

It may be that because I use FileVault, indexing is slowed. Still, all of this is puzzling.

Which application are you using to edit the slides? Please verify that the file’s modification date is changing when you make changes. Have you closed and opened the library or viewed the file in EagleFiler so that it knows to check whether there has been a modification?

I prepared the test slides in PowerPoint 2008. First page blank; second page with the name as title. File name something like Test. I then moved the file into EF. Yes, I have quit and reopened EFm and yes I have viewed the file in EF, although requires opening PowerPoint. I have even reversed pages, so that the page with the search term in its title is the first slide. It then can be read in the EF viewer.

As an example, I have attached the screenshot of the library (which is just concocted ad hoc), with a particular test file selected–a PP file with the first slide having the title Reinhofer. The second screenshot is the result of the search.

No, I meant viewing the preview in EagleFiler.

Since EagleFiler does not natively read PowerPoint files, it depends on the PowerPoint Spotlight plug-in to extract its text content for indexing. It appears that this plug-in does not extract the contents of the slides. Therefore, the slide titles will be invisible to EagleFiler (and Spotlight) searches.

Michael, your diagnosis seems correct. Oddly, I am able to find briefings in older EF libraries using fairly obscure terms in the briefings’ interiors. The briefings may have been written in PowerPoint 2004 (or PowerPoint 2003), in which case the plug-in may have been different. I did not find anything on the issue after a cursory search on the web.

As a follow-up, I still had Office 2004 on my home machine. I did a test there with PowerPoint 2004 and had no trouble with Spotlight or EagleFinder finding some text from an internal slide. I will report the bug to Microsoft.