Q:

How do I put Powerpoint and Excel documents in a full text search index like Sphinx or PostgreSQL text search?

I have a Rails application that accepts file uploads of arbitrary business documents such as from Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and PDF. I need to make all these documents searchable, preferably using Sphinx or PostgreSQL full text search. What are the best solutions?

A:

As pointed out in the comments, this is covered pretty well by an older question.
In short: you're going to have to store the relevant extracted data from those files in the database for Sphinx, and likely for PostgreSQL full-text search as well. Sphinx can now also understand plain text files (as long as a database column points to a file), but that will still involve another tool extracting data from PDF, DOC, XLS et al.

