I am generally searching a network drive, and I thought leaving SW-Exp on all night would let it index the files on that drive. But it didn't seem to work, as it takes just as much time searching for where a part/assembly is used as before. Am I missing a step, or is there some way of forcing SW-Exp to index that drive?
Do not currently have a PDM tool.
explorer does not use any sort of index - it actually reads the references in the files each time the search is run to see if any reference the file you selected.
if you need fast, upgrade to 2016 and use PDM standard - it uses a SQL database to keep track of the file references along with all of the metadata. where used searches (or even finding a file) is incredibly fast.