Searching and Filtering

Welcome to Spot on SharePoint, metadata and you. Module 5, searching and filtering with metadata. We’ve talked a lot about applying metadata, but what’s its value? SharePoint online has improved search with a number of tools and features to make it more relevant to you and your organization. You can now search for more than just documents.

Search for sites or site collections, people within your organization, or news posts. SharePoint Online’s new and improved search features include targeted search to narrow your search results to a specific list or library, the whole site, or the whole organization. Predictive text results display in real time, showing you options as you type in the search box. Indexed metadata ensures that any associated metadata columns are part of search results. Finally, your document’s content has been indexed, allowing search to return results based on the content of a file.

In addition to search, filtering in a SharePoint list or library will help you find the information you’re looking for quickly and easily. Filters can be saved to create custom views and reduce the noise in a list or library, allowing you to find content based on metadata fields using 1 or more filter choice. Let’s take a look at some examples. In our first example, we’ll start searching a site By clicking on the search box and typing in the search criteria, in this case information, and hitting enter, I get to the results page. Each result shows me the path at which it can be found, and I can filter it to specific content.

Selecting files will show me only files, Sites will show me sites, and News will show me news that are relevant to my search criteria. If I click Organization, it will search the entire environment, not just the 1 site, and I see that I have results. I can also search for people. In this case, under news, it shows me all the articles Ivy has authored. Clicking on people will give me the contact card for that person.

Exiting search will return me back to the place that I started my search from. Now let’s look at a library example. If I click into the document library, the search box automatically changes to only search the library. Predictive text is showing me results that match the search that I’ve entered. Hitting return will show me the search results within the document library respecting the views that are in play.

Clearing the search and exiting, I can come to the document library and I can choose to filter. I can select a column, filter by, and choose 1 or more values. I can continue to filter on multiple columns and on multiple values until I’m seeing only the information that I’m interested in. At the top of the library, I can see the different search criteria that I filtered by. Under views, I can click down and do save as.

This will allow me to create a personal view that is pre filtered to only the information that I wish to see. An administrator can create a public view, but anyone can create a personal view to see their content. Now I’m able to go through each of the different types of views set up in the library, including my personal view. No 1 else in my organization will see my personal view. It’s just for me to use.

Thank you for watching our video. We hope this helped you understand better how to sort and search in SharePoint Online. Please contact us with any questions. We’d love to hear from you.