Airtable search App, can I run a boolean search to identify key words within an attached pdf and/or word document?

[tomas_owens]

Hi there I have just come across the airtable search app.

The background to my question is that I run my own (very small) recruitment/staffing agency and I have 1000’s of CV/Resume documents.

Whenever a client gives me a new vacancy I will run a boolean search within my existing Recruitment CRM/ATS product and it will search through the CONTENT of each pdf/word document and show me matching candidates

e.g. I might type…

(Java OR c++) AND (developer OR programmer OR “software engineer” AND (bank* OR “hedge fund”)

…and it would search within my 10’000+ pdf/word documents and present me with the documents that fit the criteria.

Does anybody know if the airtable search app can search within an attachment in a table or can it only search the text within each block/table?

Many thanks and warmest regards

Tom

[kuovonne]

As far as I know, Airtable cannot search inside attachments out of the box. Some people have come up with creative workarounds.

One option is to convert attachment a pdf to text and store that text in a long text field.

This third party tool is also interesting, but it is not commercially available yet.

[Bill_French]

kuovonne:

also interesting, but it is not commercially available yet.

Indeed, and likely never available commercially because Airtable will likely crack this nut as it addresses advance search functionality. :winking_face:

But, in the meantime, it is possible to create scripts that harvest text from PDFs and store that as keywords or long strings.

[Moe]

tomas_owens:

…and it would search within my 10’000+ pdf/word documents and present me with the documents that fit the criteria.

We’ve built this extension. It allows you to extract text out of PDF files so you can search through them.

miniExtensions

Extract Text From PDF Attachments on Airtable - miniExtensions

The text will be extracted as plain text and added back to Airtable in a new field. Search through documents by using filters. No need to download attachments

[kuovonne]

@Bill.French, @Moe. Thanks for following up with more direct links and info on the two suggestions that I made.

[tomas_owens]

Hi there this is very interesting!

However would I be able to search Within a large set of documents For keywords?

Second question, do they have to be in PDF format?

[tomas_owens]

I there,

Many thanks to all 3 of you for your input :blush: