Searching in salesforce.com seems easy…until you don’t find what you are looking for. Here are a few tips to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your searching:
Search vs. Advanced Search
When you type anything in the search box on the sidebar of your salesforce.com page, you are telling salesforce.com to look for that word or phrase in the main fields of the records (names, sites, cities, states, phone numbers, websites, etc.) It searches most standard fields in standard objects. If you want to search everything in all records, use the advance search. All you have to do is click the Advanced Search link and then click search. This is very helpful if you are looking for information stored in a custom field or custom object like system codes, third party codes, description information, activity comments or notes. For more information on what fields are specifically searched for in Search and Advanced Search go here.
Use an Asterisk (*)
An asterisk can be a very valuable tool if you do not know the full text for which you are searching. For example, if you have an account or contact and you do not know how to spell the full name, you can search on the partial name and use an asterisk, telling the system to find something that starts that way. For example, if I am in your system and you do not know if my name is Matt or Matthew, simply search for mat* and you will find all accounts, contacts, etc. that have words in them that start with mat. This is really useful for specific codes, hard to spell names or even states (i.e.: if some of your states are IL and others are Illinois, simply search for il*)
Sort your Result Columns
Any results from your searches can be easily organized and sorted by using the column headings. Simply click on the column heading and the results will be sorted in ascending order. Click the heading again to reverse the sort into descending order. You can change what column headings are displayed by modifying the search layout by going to Setup-App Setup-Customize and selecting the object you want to change. This is useful to organize the results by state, country, owner, name or site.
Filter your Results Before you Search
If you do not want an enormous amount of data returned in your results from many different objects, you can select which object you wish to search under before you search. Use the dropdown menu to select the object you specifically wish to search in. You can also check the box titled Limit to items I own if you want to (you guessed it) limit the search results to only the items you own (can salesforce.com get any easier or user friendly?).
More search tips can be found in salesforce.com under the Help & Training link.
Some other searching tools I have heard about are putting salesforce.com in your Google search bar so that you can do a Google search of your entire salesforce.com instance and companies asking their salesforce.com CSM (Customer Success Manager) to change their sidebar search to always be in Advanced Search functionality. If anyone has more information on these tools or other searching tips, please share it.
Good luck and good searching!
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July 17, 2007 at 9:52 am
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