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I have a full-text catalog containing PowerPoint presentations. Some of those presentations contain charts, and in those cases, the chart is usually the main thing on the slide. When doing a search, I therefore want to be able to search for the text within the chart (e.g. the labels on a pie chart, the categories on a bar chart, etc.).

I'm disappointed (and surprised) to find that this does not seem to work. I can search for text within the presentation itself, but not for any of the text on the chart.

Please tell me there's just a setting somewhere that I need to change!

[I've tried this for charts created within PowerPoint, and charts created in Excel and then pasted into PowerPoint.]

Gary McGill
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1 Answers1

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Gary, the text extraction from Office documents is handled by the Office Filter Pack and as such, there is nothing Full-text can do for embedded data which the filters do not parse.

I successfully repro-ed the problem in my SQL Server 2012 install with the latest Office Filters. A quick work-around would be to add the labels/categories to the Notes section of each slide which gets parsed and filtered and returned to the full-text indexer.

aks
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  • The "little extra work" you describe is something of a piece of string, since to do it right you'd need to also include other text anywhere within the embedded document, and thus you'd actually be implementing a complete filter for Excel (or whatever). I think the built-in filter should be doing this, and I can't quite understand why it's not. – Gary McGill Aug 29 '12 at 19:36
  • Edited to remove the "piece of string". The tags need to be updated to reflect that this isn't an issue in SQL Server or Fulltext Search, but rather the result of the Office IFilters which is a separate component. – aks Aug 29 '12 at 21:47