Spotlight can't find a word in an Excel document?

Question

I'm sure someone has addressed this before, but I'm not sure which search words to even begin to try looking for my answer, so I'm just posting fresh. Apologies if this comes up day in and day out on here!
Basically, there are several files that I KNOW contain certain words in them, but they remain unseen by Searchlight. I've had my volumes all re-indexed, but still no luck.
Is it my misunderstanding that Searchlight should be able to find, for example, an Excel document with a particular word in it (not in the filename, but a word IN the Excel doc)? I thought that was the glory of Searchlight as compared to regular ol' Search.
Anyone?

Answer 1

Thanks for the link. The case mentioned there is quite similar to mine, with the difference that opening a Word document and selecting a word won't make it visible for Spotlight (unlike the poster's case).
I tried what you suggested and here's what happened:
1-Chose the unique word "Splitz" and Spotlighted it. Nothing came up.
2-Created new Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pages, and Keynote documents; typed the word "Splitz" at the beginning of each document, and didn't input any more information that the unique word.
3-Saved all documents under the title "Haravatska" (another unique word) and even made sure their extensions were visible.
4-Spotlighted the unique title "Haravatska": all documents with that title were found.
5-Spotlighted the unique word "Splitz": no results.
6-Opened the Word document titled "Haravatska" with the unique word "Splitz" in it, saved it as a .txt file under the same title. Closed it.
7-Spotlighted the unique word "Splitz" again: this time only the .txt text file was found.
Perhaps you could look at the following link:
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.mac.of
fice.word/browse_thread/thread/7abd44e5c3f38b62/a2425e
610a8781a8%23a2425e610a8781a8
As you can see your issue may not be new. I do know
and thus never really felt concern, that the
Spotlight technology defined limitations to ensure
that it didn't create indexing issues re storage and
speed that would be excessively slow or massive.
As for your problem, it doesn't appear to be common.
I do know that placing a specific word in a Word or
Excel will only work if it is positioned up front,
perhaps before the 100kb mark when Spotlight stops
reading the file.
However, having said that, am I to assume that if you
open a new document in Word, type in the unique word,
and save the file to the same drive, that the
filename does not Spotlight list the file name?
1.25Mhz 15 PowerBook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.7)