19 December 2012

Outlook 2011 for Mac Misbehavior

Recently I upgraded my work computer from Mac OS X Lion to Mountain Lion. I also updated all the MS Office apps. Everything seemed to go off without a hitch as I experienced no issues during the upgrade and all the apps I use on a daily basis haven't seemed to experience any issues... until this week.

As much as I really, really dislike the Microsoft Office products and especially Outlook, I have to use them for my work on a daily basis. Suddenly just this week Outlook began misbehaving by no longer allowing me to search for messages. Any attempt to search my inbox resulted in nothing. This quickly became a pretty big problem because the inability to search made me realize how often I rely upon this feature every day.

Upon doing some research, I found many others with this same issue, but I couldn't find a definitive solution. Digging deeper, I discovered that Outlook relies upon Spotlight to perform searches. So the solution was to reindex the messages in my inbox, right? I tried forcing this by dragging and dropping the MS Office Identities directory into the Spotlight preferences' Privacy tab and then removing it. No dice. Then I tried to simply reindex everything using mdutil:
$ sudo mdutil -i on /
Spotlight server is disabled.
Hmm, I guess I need to enable the Spotlight server:
$ sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
Then I was able to run:
$ sudo mdutil -i on /
/:
 Indexing enabled. 
$ sudo mdutil -E /
/:
 Indexing enabled. 
This seemed to trigger some indexing, but nothing notable appeared in the Spotlight menu (cmd-space) like I've seen before when the drive is being reindexed. So the last thing I tried was to determine if there is a plist file for Spotlight. My guess was that the plist file had to become corrupted. In similar cases (I had to do this recently for the screensaver) when a plist file becomes corrupted you have to remove it and let it be recreated. So I found a plist file for Spotlight and removed it:
$ rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlight.plist
After rebooting the computer, I could see the reindexing immediately kick off via the Spotlight menu. After waiting three or four hours for the drive to be indexed, I can again search the inbox in Outlook. Yay!

2 comments:

  1. If the Outlook search function is not responding, then try to troubleshoot this issue by rebuilding Outlook search index. First of all, go to File and then select Options. After that, click on Search given on the left and then select Indexing Options. After that, choose the “Advanced” option. In the end, click on the Rebuild option. After this, your Outlook search not working problem will get resolved. If this does not help you out with your issue, then try updating Microsoft Office 2016.

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  2. Your suggestions will only work on Windows, not macOS.

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