OneDrive file indexing

Hello David L. McLean,

Thanks for using Microsoft products and posting in the community.

I understand that you want to index the content of Office files and PDF files in OneDrive.

OneDrive does not index the contents of files by default. You can change this option for each file type in the Indexing Options control panel page and select Advanced > File Types¹. However, this may reduce the performance of your device and make the index larger. Alternatively, you can use the online search interface of OneDrive which may index more file content and be faster

If the above suggestions are not what you want, you can submit your ideas and suggestions through the Feedback Hub, the development team will review regularly, and every user's feedback may be noticed.

Please share the feedback link after submitting, I will vote for you. You can also share with your friends and family members, more votes will make the development team notice more quickly.

Please feel free to let me know if you have any further updates, thanks.

Best Regards,

Lenka-MSFT| Microsoft Community Support Specialist

Hello David L. McLean,

I haven't received the message from you yet. If there is anything more I can do for you or anything is unclear, please do not hesitate to let me know. 

Best Regards,

Lenka | Microsoft Community Support Specialist

I have 1.5TB of documents that I wish to store on OneDrive. I will periodically add more files to this. I'd like to make this data full text searchable to 400 people here at my office. I do not know how to share the contents of a shared OneDrive repository with hundreds of people. What type of licensing is needed? What types of files can be indexed? Thank you!

Dear David,

Good day!!

To my knowledge, yes, OneDrive can index the contents of Office files and PDFs to make them searchable. This means that if you have a document saved in OneDrive that contains text, OneDrive will scan the document and index the text so that you can search for it later.

However, as you mentioned you want the content to be searchable for the 400 people, my suggestion is to use SharePoint Online instead of OneDrive, where you can create a site with 400 people and add all the files where only the team can access. To create a site, you just need a SharePoint Online license.

Moreover, for the file types which content is crawled and indexed, please refer to this KB:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/technical-reference/default-crawled-file-name-extensions-and-parsed-file-types 

Best Regards,