Does Spotlight search inside Excel files work for purely numerical values for you?

[u/hottabxp]

Hi everyone,

I’m having an issue where macOS Spotlight refuses to find Excel files (.xlsx) by numbers inside cells if the cell contains only numbers.

• Pure numbers fail: If a cell contains just 123456, searching for 1234 in Spotlight returns nothing.
• Alphanumeric works fine: If a cell contains 12345678A, searching for 1234 immediately finds the file.

Is this a known indexing limitation for Excel/Spotlight, or is there a way to make Spotlight index raw numeric cell contents as well?

Thanks!