Can Windows10 text search find text inside a .XAR document?

[handrawn]

PS By the way, in my life PowerPoint is the dominant competitor to Xara for general-purpose creation of illustrations. Basically everyone in business has the Microsoft Office suite (which is why Microsoft has a Market Cap of $1.54 TRILLION), and almost nobody has even heard of Xara. So when working on a shared project everyone defaults to PowerPoint.

Please don't give me yet another reason why I should use PowerPoint and not Xara Designer.

now it is my turn not to understand - these two programs are not at all the same - and if you can do what want in PP and that is what others use .. then why not use it?

[Egg Bramhill]

let me sumarise all that has been said in words of one syllable

Now you're confusing me HD!

How many syllables in generalization? = 6 syllables

[handrawn]

figure of speech

as when xara says 'smart design made for everyone'

[shiphen]

now it is my turn not to understand - these two programs are not at all the same - and if you can do what want in PP and that is what others use .. then why not use it?

Yes these programs are NOT at all the same.

But in business almost everyone I know, when they want to do a diagram they reach for PowerPoint.

Now, if I am working in a Team environment... can I convince everyone else to buy Xara?
Can I convince everyone else to struggle up the learning curve of Xara's (not rather dated) whole user interface?
Can I convince everyone else to try Xara Cloud?

No, of course I can't.

I can built my diagrams in Xara, but I need other people to edit them. And then I need to edit their edits....
And guess what, I'm forced to use PowerPoint.


To answer other question... I find Xara a serious pain to use because as soon as I have too many Xara files, without any way of doing a text search across them I suddenly find it super-hard to find the correct file.

J

[handrawn]

ok well the horse has probably left the paddock by now never mind the stable door, but the answer to 'the other question' is forward planning - acorn has been sugesting mirroring your files by saving them in wix as well as xar, one way to do it - keeping your own database would be another... yes more work than batch searching *.xar but you can at least batch search *.wix

[Acorn]

Yes these programs are NOT at all the same.
But in business almost everyone I know, when they want to do a diagram they reach for PowerPoint.
Now, if I am working in a Team environment... can I convince everyone else to buy Xara?
Can I convince everyone else to struggle up the learning curve of Xara's (not rather dated) whole user interface?
Can I convince everyone else to try Xara Cloud?
No, of course I can't.
I can built my diagrams in Xara, but I need other people to edit them. And then I need to edit their edits....
And guess what, I'm forced to use PowerPoint.
To answer other question... I find Xara a serious pain to use because as soon as I have too many Xara files, without any way of doing a text search across them I suddenly find it super-hard to find the correct file.
J

I have 169,000 XAR files and 2,600 WEB files.

I work in Teams all the time. I use folders, project names and meaningful file names to organise things.
As an IT business consultant I have to work with the tools available or prescribed.

In your example, I would not force a Xara Desktop application (XDA) on the Team but use the XDA to create the text and diagram and Export as a PPTX.
I then have a source file (XAR) and output file (PPTX).
If there were lots of Team transactions then I would work in PowerPoint and finally import into the XDA, update or keep as a version and PPTX out.

Inbetween, I might (meaning I have) created the Slidepack into a Xara Website and embedded into the corporate environment, avoiding the mess of downloading a PPTX and running PowerPoint to view. When this is done the quirkiness of the XDA vanishes as other Team members start asking how was all that done.

Corporate deliveries on a stick or as a published website or even in Xara Cloud all allow for interactive presentation, bids and contracts to be generated as HTML, PPTX and PDF.
I turned round a quality management system costing £250,000/y for a large organisation into a collection of XWDPv12 licences quite a time back. No one complained.

Again, a XARA file is an editable source with multiple output formats.
Try version controlling a PPTX without a proper CMS and even the simple XDA Backup becomes a godsend.

Acorn

[handrawn]

that sounds like very good advice

[capellan]

After reading the Xara Format Document http://http://site.xara.com/support/...atDocument.pdf
I am sure that Magix/Xara could provide a plugin to search inside Xara documents.

Notice that on installation, Xara install a program that allows Windows to read the preview bitmap of the Xara document.

If I understood well the Xara format manual, Xara files are compressed using the zlib format, so a plugin that reads inside Xara documents must be able to uncompress each one of these zlib compressed records inside the file and read the text.

By the way, Does wix format works well in all Xara versions?
In my computer, only Xara x1 could read and write wix files.
The rest could not write wix files but could read them.

Al

[handrawn]

wix is an export format - it's there in my xdpx15.1 - afaik it's always been there

reading the preview bitmap does not, afaik, require the whole xar to be uncompressed, it is a specific function that integrates with the window OS

maybe it is possible for xara to write a plugin, but that is not to say it there would be money in it for them...

[handrawn]

capellan - your link is broken....