Weak support for content search/Windows7?

I have been all over the internet and through the tutorials. I have searched Windows Help and I can't seem to find the answer. To be fair I am an XP user and am completely sold on Seven albut for this one problem.

I am searching for very specific strings that are contained in multiple XLS files in a single subdirectory. I know that these strings exist in a Text field in all of these files. Windows search doesn't seem to have an advanced search screen and it always fails to find any numbers. As a matter of fact it shows no hits at all.

It did work with XP.

I have listed that directory in the the index. That doesn't seem to help.

Have you enabled index contents?

Okay, looks like my mistake might be assuming that Microsoft would automatically include a link to a Microsoft product in the index associataion table. It is reindexing now.. I'll let you know.

Yep, that was the issue. I expected Microsoft to automatically support legacy MS Office file types. Lesson to be learned here.