Tips and tricks on how to search for organizational content more effectively

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Across Microsoft solutions, it is possible to search for work/organizational content in many different entry points, such as Office.com, Sharepoint.com and Microsoft Bing – Work tab.

Office.com and Sharepoint.com are great places to start a search across all your personal and content accessible to you within your organization, including shared documents, offering capabilities that can help you navigate content in a way that suits you the best.

This post will guide you through some of the most frequent work search tasks and demonstrate how you can achieve them with different methods. You will learn how to optimize your search experience and access the information you need efficiently.

It all starts with the Search box.

The Search box can help you find your recent content quickly and easily. It shows you suggestions of Files, People, and Apps that you interact with frequently.

How does starting your search in Office.com or Sharepoint.com looks like

You can also use keywords like “ppt” or “doc” to refine the results you are seeing in the Search box suggestions.

Retrieve Word documents by using ‘doc’ keyword.

Retrieve PowerPoint documents by using ‘ppt’ keyword.

You can also get People results in Search box suggestions based on their phone number or department.

People search suggestions based on phone number.

People search suggestions based on department name.

Navigating to Search Results Page

If you don’t see what you are looking for in Search box suggestions, press enter or click ‘Show more results’ to go to the results page to explore more content. You can use different tabs or filters to refine the results you are seeing.

As an example, you can use People tab and different keywords to search for people based on their department or job title.

Search for People based on department name.

Search for People based on job title.

Or go to Messages tab to find an Email or a Teams message with specific keywords.

Email and Teams messages search.

Easily navigate through your own content

Navigating through your own content daily can be challenging. Sometimes you may want to search for a specific document you created or edited, or a message/email you sent. This can be easily done by typing your name in the Search box and clicking on the Search box suggestion. This opens up a Person Centric Search view shown below.

It is worth noting that Messages tab is currently available in Office.com and is yet to come to Sharepoint.com

Navigating to People Centric Search view by clicking on suggestions in the Search Box

You can further narrow down your own content by typing additional keywords in the search box next to the name pill or using filter and tab refiners.

Using keyword + File Type filter to further refine your search

Search for people and content they shared.

You can search for your colleagues’ content or understand their position in the organizational chart by looking them up and clicking on their name from the search box suggestion.

Browse through content your colleagues have shared with you.

Understand your company organization and who your colleagues report to.

This feature only shows public content and content that has been explicitly shared with you by the person you are looking up. Hence in some cases, you may not get any results.

You can only browse through content explicitly shared with you.

Getting to work search results in Microsoft Bing

We are currently working to bring the same set of search capabilities across Office.com, Sharepoint.com and Bing.com/work.

To access work search in Bing.com, you need to be signed into Bing with your organizational account. This will enable you to see top work search results in the All-Tab. You can further explore work content by clicking some of the work result suggestions or going straight to Work tab.