Find Data, Workbooks, and Visualizations

This topic describes how you can search for items such as objects, workbooks, and columns.

How Is Data Indexed?

When you search or visualize data from the Home page, your results are determined by what information has been indexed.

The system runs a process to index your saved objects, workbook content, and dataset column information. The indexing process also updates the index file to reflect any objects, workbooks, or datasets that you deleted from your system so that these items are no longer displayed in your search results.

For all datasets, the column metadata is indexed. For example, column name, the data type used in the column, aggregation type, and so on. Column data is indexed for Excel spreadsheet, CSV, and TXT dataset columns with 1,000 or fewer distinct rows. Note that no database column data is indexed and therefore that data isn’t available in your search results.

Search for Content

Use the search bar on the Home page to find items such as datasets, workbooks, and machine learning scripts.

  1. On the Home page, locate the search bar.
  2. Enter your search criteria. Note the following options:
    • Click in the search bar for a drop down list of all content types, such as workbook, report, and dataset. Click a content type to add it to the search bar. Or below the search bar, click one of the search tags to add it to the search bar.
    • Build or modify a search tag by adding or removing other items.
    • Specify the full or partial name of what you're looking for. The search is case-insensitive.
    • To clear your search terms, in the search bar click X or select search tags and delete.
  3. In the search results, click an object to display it.

Search Options

You can enter advanced search commands in the search bar to tailor your search results for exact matches, multi-term matches, and field-level matches.

You can combine multiple search terms with commands to narrow or widen your search. For example, name:(revenue AND Analysis). Search commands and search terms are case-insensitive.

Search Command Description Example

AND

Enter AND between search terms to only display content which contains all the search terms. All forms of AND, such as, and, &&, or entering two search terms together, will return the same results.

Revenue AND Forecast

Revenue and Forecast

Revenue && Forecast

Revenue Forecast

OR

Enter OR between search terms to display content that contains any of the search terms.

Revenue OR Profit

Revenue or Profit

Revenue || Profit

NOT

After entering a search term, enter NOT followed by more search terms to exclude any content from the results which match the search terms entered after the NOT command.

Revenue NOT Product

Revenue not Product

?

Enter the question mark (?) character in a search term as a wildcard to signify a single unknown character. This ensures that the search results include content with words matching the known characters from the search term. For example, searching for st?r would include results containing star and stir.

st?r

*

Enter the asterisk (*) character at the end of a partial search term or root word as a wildcard to find all content that contains the partial search term as well as content that contain variations of the root word. For example, searching for employ* would include results for employee, employment, or employer.

Employ*

name:

Enter name: followed by a search term to search for content where the search term is part of the Name field.

name:Revenue Analysis

description:

Enter description: followed by a search term to search for content where the search term is contained in the Description field of the content.

description:template

desc:template

owner:

Enter owner: followed by a search term to search for content where the search term is contained in the Owner field of the content.

owner:Admin

columns:

Enter columns: followed by a search term to search for objects that reference columns matching the search term.

columns:product

text:

Enter text: at the beginning of a search followed by a search term to search for content where the search term is contained in any of the content's fields.

text:Revenue

""

Enclose a search term with double quotation marks to search for content that includes phrases or stop words which match the search term.

"Balance Letter"

"Research by analysis"

Search Tips

Use these tips to help you find your content.

  • Searching in Non-English Locales - When you enter criteria in the search field, what displays in the drop-down list of suggestions can differ depending upon your locale setting. For example, if you’re using an English locale and enter sales, then the drop-down list of suggestions contains items named sale and sales. However, if you’re using a non-English locale such as Korean and type sales, then the drop-down list of suggestions contains only items that are named sales and items such as sale aren’t included in the drop-down list of suggestions.
  • Searching for New Objects and Data - If you create or save a workbook or create a dataset and then immediately try to search for it, then it’s likely that your search results won’t contain matches. If this happens, refresh your browser. If you still can't find the new object or data, then wait a few minutes for the indexing process to run, and retry your search. Users can access only the data they've been given permission to access.