Can anyone please give me a clue as to why Opus Find no longer finds my Wordperfect document files "containing text" if the string has spaces. It still finds text files this way. I am sure the Wordperfect document doesn't have any funny symbols as spaces and I am pretty sure I used to be able to search for these documents containing strings with spaces.
If a .wpd and .txt file contain the string "The cat sat on the mat.", Opus Find will find both files if you put containing text "cat". However if you put "The cat", it only finds the text file.
Have a look at the Word Perfect file in a hex editor (or in Opus via the Text plugin, which will display it as hex if it isn't a pure text file).
If you search (Ctrl-F) for "cat" I bet you'll see that the character after it isn't a space (20 in hex).
I don't know much about the Word Perfect file format but I bet it doesn't guarantee anything about storing the text in plain text within the file. It could be fragmented, compressed, littered with formatting codes, and so on.
A few experiments with "find on click," a purpose built file finder from 2brightsparks, shows that it behaves like DOpus when you throw this task it at. It cannot find phrases in WordPerfect. (It does seem to work in Word files.)
If you really need this feature, and want a tool for everyday use, then your best bet may be to get a desktop search tool. I use X1. This will find phrases in files.
X1 costs money, albeit less than DOpus. There are other free packages out there, including Microsoft's own, now built into Vista.
I always prefer search software that can handle everything I throw at it, rather than program specific packages that can handle only their own formats. Otherwise you end up using a whole raft of the darn things.
When faced with "exotic" file formats, such as WordPerfect, the thing to look out for is the ability to use iFilter technology. This is the text extraction stuff that allows indexing software to do their thing.
X1 has no problems in indexing and displaying wpd files. I still have a few left over from the days when it was my software of choice for word processing.
A bit off topic perhaps but issues like this is why I no longer store important text in any format other than as a plain text based document. Then when I need to find something, in Opus I simply go to the parent folder in question and use the Opus Find Utility to search for the word or phrase I'm looking for in all of the files in that folder. It's fast and accurate.
I don't keep track of how often I'll do this but it's usually several times a day for sure.