Windows 7 User Submissions

Windows 7 Search by Keyword

by Paul Joireman
(Batavia, IL)

I work in an environment that has both Windows XP and Windows 7 OS. We generate files with many different extensions, *.doc(x), *.xls, *.txt, *.pdf, *.jpg and many more.

Finding files can sometimes be difficult, but we have found that using the keyword properties helps (right click the file and select Properties --> Summary tab). Within XP this is very easy to do and with Windows Desktop Search 4 we can search with the syntax "keywords: my_keyword" and find all files with my_keyword.

Within Windows 7 I can use the same search syntax but the search result set is more limited than what I would find with XP. Windows 7 does not seem to be able to find keywords from certain files (*.txt, *.pdf). If I tag a *.txt file with a given keyword on an XP machine and copy it to a Windows 7 machine. The context menu does not allow the properties to be changed (as the Windows 7 help states very clearly), and a search by keyword does not find this file. However, the keyword is still associated with this file because I can extract the keyword using TaggedFrog (a file tagging utility).

I'm trying to understand why this feature is enabled for a smaller subset of files on Win7 (MS office docs, *.jpg, music files) than WinXP (evertyhing previous as well as *.pdf and *.txt). Is there some way of enabling keyword tagging of files regardless of extension?