spreadsheets

General discussion related to "Everything".
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El1ce0
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Sep 30, 2018 7:15 pm

spreadsheets

Post by El1ce0 »

I have an Excel file in a folder/subfolder on my desktop and am atttempting to find the file with the sheet name 'Backwards'. What is the procedure to find that file?
NotNull
Posts: 5167
Joined: Wed May 24, 2017 9:22 pm

Re: spreadsheets

Post by NotNull »

That depends ...

There are 2 common file extensions for Excel spreadheet files: the older .XLS files and the newer .XLSX files (Excel 2007 and newer)

There are existing Windows methods - that Everything uses too - to intelligently read the contents of spreadheets, documents, PDF files etc.
But the names of the sheets are not part of what Windows will read.
(Not entirely sure; I don't use Excel or Windows Search, but this is how it should work)

The newer XLSX fileformat is basically a zip-file. You can extract it's contents with any compression utility. The result is a couple of XML files in some directories.. (If you do this, you will notice that the sheet names are even in a separate folder from the sheet contents)


Everything has an EXTRA option to read the content of files if the Windows methods as descibed above don't work or are not available: it can also read (what I call) "raw data". Start from bit 1 and stop at the last bit to find the text (or sooner if the text was already found)
But that doesn't work on XLSX zip-files: it's content gets "encrypted" during the zipping.

So, no luck with XLSX files ...


XLS files on the other hand are a lot more straightforward. You can probably find the files containg the 'Backward' sheetnames with a command like:
shell:desktop ext:xls content:Backwards

The "intelligent" still will not find the sheetnames, but the "raw" method will.

Be aware that this can take a while, as Everything has to read each XLS file completely on-the-fly (twice; first using the "intelligent"method and then the "raw" method).
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