Boolean search inside attachments - 2023 update?

[Vikram]

Hi Folks,

We have one or more attachments (pdf, docx mostly) per record, and want to run a Boolean search on the content of these documents. This is similar to how you can search in Google Drive, Dropbox etc.

@kuovonne I saw some of your suggested workaround. Do you know if Airtable or any extensions / integrations have done this seamlessly?

Thanks in advance,

Vikram

[Stephen_Orr1]

I'm not aware of any native ability to read the contents of an attachment but this could be done with Airtable scripting. You can use a somewhat hacky method with eval() to import external libraries that can do these things and parse the result in your base.

[kuovonne]

Airtable scripting cannot look directly inside pdf or doc attachments. It can look at plain text files. 

I suggest looking into third party services that can perform searches into the file types you want (or that can extract text into plain text format).

[Vikram]

Thanks folks. I'm exploring a two step process.

Step 1: Use the relevant 3rd party tool to extract the Data in a structured format (e.g. Google Sheets).

Step 2: Use Zapier to push a new record in Aortab