I have spent a few posts on the capabilities of workspace, on how it changes the search experience, how it enables multitasking and how it reinvents the global search. What I did not mention anywhere yet is that the workspace advanced search allows us to be much more creative when defining search criteria also!
By default, when searching, Workspace will list all fuzzy search results that match all search terms, across all columns and ignoring caps as I detailed before in my initial post on Workspace. Like there would be an AND in between all search terms.
But what if that is not enough? What if you want to search that is more flexible? Well, there are many more options! Some of them have been around all along, but the last one is brand new in 20A, so please make sure to read through to the end!
Question Mark ? and Star *
All traditional search methods use a few wild cards that help search for one specific character or parts of a word and Workspace, of course, has them too.
A ‘?’ can be used to search for a specific character …
… whilst a ‘*’ can be used to search for parts of words or sentences.
OR and NOT
When searching with multiple search criteria by default the search will only list search results that match them all, as if there was an AND operator in between them. This default behavior can be overridden though.
Using OR you can actually widen your search as search results only need to meet one of the search criteria instead of all of them. For this to work, OR must be written in uppercase, leaving you the possibility to use ‘or’ as search criteria.
NOT can be used to limit the search results by including search results that meet the search criteria mentioned before NOT, but excluding search results that including search criteria terms that are mentioned after the NOT. Just like OR, NOT needs to be written in uppercase, leaving us the possibility to search for ‘not’.
Field Search using : and ::
Nothing surprising so far right? Just expected search behavior? Wait till you understand how to use and abuse ‘::’ in a search!
‘::’ can be used to search for specific field values e.g. in the search below want I search for opportunities with sales stages ’01 – Qualification’. Notice how I get a preview of the different sales stage field values with a counter of how many records would match this search result.
You can refer to any field available using a ‘::’.
Taking it a step further, I can search on fields from another related object e.g. the search below returns opportunities for the account ‘Vincent Construction’ only.
You can refer to another object using a ‘:’ and then to a field of that object using a ‘::’ like in the example above.
Is that not a completely new dimension to search for data using Workspace? Let me know what you think of the Workspace advanced search!
