Searching Excel files

[Anonymous]

When Zoom searches Excel files, does the entire Excel document appear in the search results or just the row(s) in the document in which the keywords appear?

[Ray]

When a match is found in an Excel document, the context description will display words surrounding (before and after) the search word found. This is not limited to the specific row that the keyword was found in, and may show words from the rows before or after (depending on the size of context description being shown).

You can increase the size of the context description to show a larger portion of each document, but there is no option to always show "the entire Excel document". I wonder if you are sure that you want this, since it would make the search results listing ridiculously long (assuming 10 results per page, then you'll have the contents of 10 excel documents on the same page... whats the point of searching then?)

[Anonymous]

Actually I just wanted to confirm that only the part of the document that was relevant would be picked up by Zoom.

If I spaced out each entry in the excel document to have 2 empty rows between them, would Zoom show only the relevant row in the result? (since they would be all spaced out).

[Ray]

No, empty spaces are ignored and do not affect the way Zoom would display context description. However, if you had a row of cells containing text like "-------", then you might be able to get it to not display the other rows with some careful configuration (but there'll be alot of "----"s in your context description).

[Anonymous]

Excel files

OK. How about if I have an Excel file with hundreds of entries and i upload this file to my website and get the Zoom searcher.

I would like people that come to my website to be able to get search results from this Excel file through Zoom. BUT the file itself must not be accessible to anyone who comes to my site. Is this possible?

[David]

Zoom was designed to find web page (and documents) from within a large collection of web pages.

It was not really designed to look up only a particular cell in an Excel spreadsheet. Excel documents get converted and treated as a text file. If you save your Excel file as a CSV file or a text file then you will have some idea about how Zoom sees the file.

Zoom indexes all the text in a Excel file. So if you want to protect the file, having it available in search results is not the best way.

Nevertheless you could use standard HTML authentication technique to restrict access to the file but still have it indexed.

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David

[Anonymous]

So, instead of having 400 entries in an excel file, it would be better to have those 400 entries on 400 different web-pages then?

Would those 400 webpages need to be linked to any other page on my website for Zoom to find them? Or can they be stand alone (which would be much less work for me in terms of linking pages together!)

Thank you for all your help btw

[David]

It is hard to give good advice without knowning your business objectives and the content of the Excel file(s).

Depending on the the data, your goals and the way to want to search and display the data it might make sence to create a custom SQL database with some PHP scripting.

Regarding Zoom. Yes it can index 400 files. Web pages are generally a better option than Excel files as you have more control over the page title, meta data & text flow. Plus anyone can open them. (you don't need Excel).

If you index in offline mode the documents don't need to be linked. You can stick them all in a folder.

I would try it with maybe 5 to 10 document first. Better doing this than wasting time making 400 documents.

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David