Spotlight cannot open, preview or quick look certain filetypes

Hello Ludvig_F,

To start off, we advise that you restart your Mac (Shut down or restart your Mac) and make sure it's fully updated (Update macOS on Mac). Once those are done, please test this issue.

If the issue persists, continue by testing to see when this behavior occurs. First, put your Mac into safe mode and test. Booting into safe mode will disable any startup and login items from automatically opening, which can help us to isolate the source of the issue further. When you do this, you’ll see some unusual behavior from the display; this is to be expected. Please follow the steps in this article: How to use safe mode on your Mac. 

Next, let's see if this behavior persists in a second user account on your Mac. Testing in a new user will determine if you have a system-wide issue or if it's user-specific. Please follow these steps to make a test account that can be deleted later: Change Users & Groups settings on Mac.

Let us know how this goes, please. Thanks and take care.

This same thing is happening to me, too. I used to be able to search for a document—this happens to .docx and .pdf files alike—and hit Return for the item to open in Preview. Hitting Return no longer opens the item or have any other action. This issue does not affect opening desktop apps.

I am running macOS Ventura 13.2.1, and I have no issue opening Spotlight found documents with a return that have an application that can open them. The lone exception is a Word document created in 1995 that Word 16.69.1 refuses to open, though LibreOffice v7.5 opens it properly.

kind:word -(.docx)
kind:word +.docx (both of these open in MS Word)
kind:pdf (opens in Preview)
kind:adobe +.ai (opens in Affinity Publisher)
kind:adobe +.psd (opens in Affinity Designer)
kind:image +.cr3 (opens in Preview, but may not if RAW image unsupported by Apple)
kind:apple +.cwk (AppleWorks document opens in LibreOffice Writer 7.5)
kind:3rd +.wpd (WordPerfect document opens in LibreOffice Writer 7.5)
kind:CSS (opens .css stylesheet in Sublime Text 4 programmer's editor)

When one has the open Spotlight window and a list of categorical files shown, one can press the spacebar on any filename and if a supporting Quick Look Generator (qlgenerator) is installed, a Quick Look window will appear with the document contents displayed. This in deference to expecting Spotlight to open a panel in its results and display the document there (which it did not) for the above examples).

Hi, thank you for the reply! I was previously able to hit Return and the item would open in its designated app. All .pdf files are set to open in Preview. I think this might be a Google Drive issue, actually, the more I investigate it. Not sure how to set my MacBook to index a streamed, virtual drive.