One nice thing about Windows is the indexing service. It can be very helpful if you have a large body of material to search through. If you use Open Office or its commercial equivalent Star Office, you’ll soon discover that indexing doesn’t work on those files. That’s because Windows does not have a component called an IFilter for those files. The IFilter tells the indexing service how to read a given file format.
The same problem exists if you run Windows Vista 64-bit and want your PDF files indexed.
Fortunately, there is a solution. The IFilter shop provides filters for Open Office/Star Office documents, PDF documents, and a host of others. You can get the Open Office IFilter at www.ifiltershop.com/sofilter.html. There are links on the same page to a number of other useful filters.
