Search words/ phrases within attachments (Word/PDF)

Questions & Answers
1

Search functionality within the docs

  • I’m using Monday Desktop app since more than a year now. I have a column with Attachments, primarily with Word and PDF’s where I could open the doc and use ctrl + F to find any words/ phrases within the document (this worked in the beginning, over 7 months ago).
  • Since last 6-7 months, I do not see the functionality anymore with the Desktop app. However, the web has this (powered by the browser’s own search, which is not very effective, the search returns parameters of not just the doc, but the whole page in the background as well).

Does anyone have any answer/ work around to this solution? or has the functionality been removed completely?

Any help on this is really appreciated.

2

Hi @Kapardhi,

great to have you here! :slight_smile:

I cannot speak for the Monday App because I have never used it. Through Make you could do some other solutions:

  1. Read content from Word/PDFs through Google Cloud Vision
    → put into a Monday Column
    → ask GPT questions about the content
    → automatically summarise the document

Maybe this can help? :slight_smile:

2 Likes
3

Welcome to the Make community!

To be able to extract text from PDF, you can first convert it to a plain text document using CloudConvert.

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4

Hi @Richard_Johannes,

Thank you for the warm welcome. I’m indeed excited to be here and share/ contribute my ideas to the community.

Although I use ‘Make’ for other automations related to Monday, I really do not want to carve out another Make automation for this purpose. My main simple purpose is to read through document and find some specific keywords (differs from time-to-time for the same doc).

For example, one huge scenario where I’d like to screen a particular resume and find keywords of a particular skill set And I have hundreds, if not thousands of resumes to search from in a particular board on Monday. I would simply Ctrl+F in the document and search the keyword within the document. This worked in the very beginning inside the Monday Desktop App (about 12 months ago).

I’m really curious as to why Monday’s Desktop app has removed this seemingly simple functionality. This was a game changer for me when I first ported all my meta data of applicants (along with their CV’s/resumes) to Monday from native OneDrive for document storage (Although, OneDrive is still my golden record for storage).

5

Yeah, I see your challenge! Have you tried it in the browser? Did you reach out to the Monday team/community ? Maybe they know what’s going on? :slight_smile:

2 Likes
6

Browser does work, but with a bit of a twist. It uses the browser’s built in search, which does work on the floating document, but also works on the board beneath the document (If I search a query “Monday”, I’d get all words from within the board as well as the document). So I really cant rely much, but I agree, it is of some help rather than nothing.

I did reach out to the tech team. To my surprise, they mentioned the search within the Monday App was never there and redirected me to use the browser’s search.

But, I’d like to give another try with the tech team again and get back on what they say. Thank you for your very prompt response.