Incomplete indexing (searching) of endnotes in some Word documents

Question

Incomplete indexing (searching) of endnotes in some Word documents

Calloo 40

I have many Word documents with endnotes. To search my files I use Agent Ransack (super-fast), which normally is able to search endnotes along with comments and anything else. However, I discovered that it's not finding text in the endnotes in one of the documents, and in another, it obtains results from some notes and not others. There's nothing unusual about the notes or documents, I wrote them the same way as all the others. I asked the Agent Ransack people, who said the program uses the Office iFilter. I wasn't able to find any useful information about that. How do I fix the indexing?

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Answer 1

Lucus-V 12,875 Microsoft External Staff Moderator

Hi Calloo,

Thank you for the detailed information.

The behavior you are seeing may be related to the Office iFilter, which is the component used by Windows and some third-party search applications to extract searchable text from Office documents. According to the information you received, Agent Ransack uses the Office iFilter when searching Word documents, so the search results depend on what content the filter is able to extract from the file. In some cases, document-specific issues can prevent all content, including endnotes, from being indexed correctly.

That said, Agent Ransack is a third-party product and is not developed or supported by Microsoft. As a result, we are limited in our ability to troubleshoot its indexing behavior directly. For issues related to how the application processes search results, the vendor would be the best resource for product-specific guidance.

Since the issue appears to affect only certain documents rather than all Word files, one troubleshooting step you may want to try is recreating the affected document in a fresh .docx file:

Open the affected document.
Create a new blank Word document.
Copy the content from the original document and paste it into the new document.
Save the new file as a .docx.
Test whether the endnote content can now be found by your search tool.

This process rebuilds the document structure and can sometimes resolve document-specific indexing issues that are not visible when the file is viewed in Word.

Please let us know whether the issue persists after recreating the affected document(s).

Calloo 40 Reputation points

2026-09-10T19:27:33.9066667+00:00

@Lucus-V Hi, I should have mentioned that I had already tried copying and pasting the text into a blank .docx document, but the result was the same. However, just now, as an experiment I saved it in the old .doc format. This made the search successful. When I then saved the new document as .docx, unfortunately the problem returned.
Lucus-V 12,875 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-09-12T17:47:17.1733333+00:00

Hi Calloo,

Thank you for the update. The fact that the search works in the legacy .doc format but stops working again after converting back to .docx suggests the issue is related to how the .docx file is being processed by the indexing/filtering mechanism rather than the endnote content itself.

Since Agent Ransack is a third-party product, we're unfortunately limited in how deeply we can investigate its indexing behavior from the Microsoft side. However, your .doc versus .docx test provides useful evidence to share with the vendor, as it appears the content is present and readable in Word but is not being fully indexed in the .docx version.

At this point, I don't have any additional Word-specific troubleshooting steps to suggest. You may want to follow up with the Agent Ransack support team and provide the results of your testing, as they may be able to determine why the .docx format is being handled differently in their indexing workflow.

Thanks for sharing your findings. They help narrow the issue considerably.

Answer 2

Calloo 40

@Lucus-V Thanks. I discovered however that if I do a standard search in a File Explorer window, the same thing happens: the text is found in the .doc file, but not in the .docx file. So it seems to me that Agent Ransack revealed a problem happening at the Office end, but otherwise isn't at issue. Is the problem maybe a bug that I should report?

Lucus-V 12,875 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-09-13T16:25:47.89+00:00
Hi Calloo,

Thank you for taking the time to investigate this further and for sharing your findings. The comparison between the .doc and .docx versions, along with the File Explorer search results, is very helpful information and provides additional context for understanding the behavior.

As this is a community forum, our ability to investigate potential product issues is limited, and we don't have access to the engineering tools or internal diagnostics needed to determine the root cause from here. If you believe the behavior may indicate an issue that should be reviewed by the product team, I would encourage you to submit feedback through either:

Word: Help > Feedback

Feedback Hub: Send feedback to Microsoft with the Feedback Hub app

When submitting feedback, it may be helpful to include the testing you've already performed, particularly the observation that the endnote content is found in the .doc version but not in the corresponding .docx version.

Thank you again for the detailed troubleshooting and for reporting back with your results.
Calloo 40 Reputation points

2026-09-14T02:10:03.8733333+00:00

@Lucus-V Thanks. I know the community forum has limitations, so I'll submit my findings through the Feedback Hub (for some reason the Feedback link in Word isn't working for me). I appreciate your help.