UNACCEPTABLE: Pages docs with page breaks can't be searched past the 1st page break

royksjr wrote:

Do something, Apple!

This is a user-to-user technical support forum. Apple does not read here for feedback or suggestions. You can let them know your thoughts here:

Product Feedback - Apple

I have no problem searching entire documents even if they have page breaks.

I just saved a Word .docx of several pages from LibreOffice v7.1.4 to my Desktop. A Spotlight search for a specific word obtained an immediate match for that sole Word document. So the Internet altruism that Spotlight cannot search Word .docx documents, and especially newly created ones may be more folklore than fact. Certainly not worth converting Word documents that can be opened by most word processing applications to Pages documents that can only be opened by Pages.

As for the failure to search in Pages documents with one or more page breaks, that is not my experience here with any historical version of Pages up to and including v11.1 on macOS 11.5.

royksjr wrote:

As to Pages, congratulations, your experience is relevant to 1 person in 8 billion: you. One person I spoke with at Apple said Yes, there is a problem with Pages searching. They discovered that by searching via google.

Note that I also didn't have any problem searching past page breaks. It also doesn't seem to be something that shows up a lot on the forums. The fact that is doesn't happen to everyone certainly leaves open the possibility that the problem is with your particular set up, not Pages itself.

If there is a problem with Microsoft Office's mdimporter, that is a Microsoft issue, and not Apple's responsibility to fix — unless there is a flaw in the Apple framework(s) that Microsoft uses to build their Office mdimporter. One would hope as long as people have been complaining about it that Microsoft would have fixed it by version 16.52.

I cannot test Microsoft Office here as I no longer have a practical need for it, and I have no intention of expending money on something I would not use other than satisfying posts in this community. As far as Word documents from other application sources, I stand by my ability to search and find content in those documents using the current Spotlight search facilities.

There are many limitations in the Pages search tool that aggravate those accustomed to MS Word. No argument there.

Neither IdrisSeabright nor I are new to the rodeo, or Pages, and if we both state that we have no issue searching past page breaks, that is not fiction, even if in your perspective, that is 2 people out of 8 billion. I guess I would be suspicious if an Apple support employee had to resort to Google to determine there was a search issue in Pages, at least one spanning page breaks, which I cannot duplicate here with several versions of Pages, on different operating systems (including macOS 11.5), and different multipage Pages documents.

VikingOSX wrote:

I cannot test Microsoft Office here as I no longer have a practical need for it, and I have no intention of expending money on something I would not use other than satisfying posts in this community. As far as Word documents from other application sources, I stand by my ability to search and find content in those documents using the current Spotlight search facilities.

I just tested Spotlight on .docx files. It was fast and appeared accurate.

What we have been saying all along… Spotlight does work. 😎