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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 4
Search and Search Box Features
An essential part of the modern online workplace is the search engine. Whether you use it find long-lost content you haven’t touched in years or it’s your shortcut to open a dashboard you update every morning, search is a critical tool to many and should be part of everyone’s menu.
But too few people know how to really use search engines. While Teams has its own search engine, Microsoft 365 has one as well. This chapter will cover how to be a power user of both, as well as provide a few other ways to use the Teams search box.
Search in Teams
Teams search got a major upgrade in 2021 from being a fairly simple tool to gaining a lot of power, aligning much more closely with the overall Microsoft Search in Microsoft 365.
You can use Teams search to find conversations, files, people, and more. You can also filter your results based on location, date, people, and other aspects to help you home in on that pesky thing you’ve been looking for.
Search in Teams
In the Teams search box, type the term you want to search for. Press Enter to search.
Note: Teams will provide suggestions as you type, which may mean you don’t even have to go searching at all.
Search results will likely display on the All tab, meaning you’ll see messages, files, people, and other information types together.
Click the Messages tab to display results related to your conversations. Results will be split up based on most relevant and most recent.
Note: To improve your results, use the provided refiners (filters).
Under Type, click Chat or Channel to filter your results by private chat or Teams content.
Under Team and Channel, enter a Team or channel name to filter by that Team or channel.
Under From, enter a person’s name to filter results related only to that person.
Under Date, select a time frame to filter results to match a certain timeline.
Next to My @mention, check the box to filter results only to those where you were @mentioned explicitly.
Next to Has attachment, check the box to filter results to include only messages that reference files.
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Why do my search options look different?
Historically, search is an experience that Microsoft fiddles with on a regular basis. Minor changes occur frequently, and this can lead to what you see looking different from what’s shown here. Following the major update to Teams search in 2021, there will likely be many minor changes because of lessons learned and customer feedback. Use the steps in this section as a general guide.
Use Microsoft Search
Microsoft Search is a higher-tier search engine that spans all of Microsoft 365, not just Teams. Microsoft Search gives you results from Teams, Outlook, Yammer, SharePoint, OneDrive, Delve, and other Microsoft 365 apps all in one place. You can even get Bing search results incorporated with work search if you use Microsoft Edge.
Use Microsoft Search
In your favorite browser, browse to office.com and log in with your work or school account.
Note: For additional features, use Microsoft Edge.
In the Microsoft Search box in the suite bar at top, type the term you want to search for. Press Enter to search.
Note: Microsoft Search will provide suggestions as you type, which may mean you don’t even have to go searching at all.
Search results will likely display under the All tab, meaning you’ll see messages, files, people, and other information types together.
Click Filters to pare down your results to ones that are more relevant. In this case, we are displaying only web pages modified in the last three months.
Use the tabs to view filtered results limited to files, sites, people, news (in SharePoint), Power BI, and conversations (across Outlook, Yammer, and Teams).
Search Tricks in Teams
An Introduction to KQL
Keyword query language (KQL) is a scary-sounding-but-actually-easy-to-use set of features for improving your searches so you get the best results you can in Teams (and across all Microsoft Search boxes). KQL includes a number of terms, symbols, and functions you can include in your search term to specify exactly what you mean when searching. A few of the best KQL terms are listed in this section. For the full list, search Microsoft KQL in your favorite search engine to find the most up-to-date article on all your options.
NOT and -
Excluding certain terms from search results is one of the most useful—if lesser known—features in most search engines, including Microsoft and Teams search. Place a - (simple hyphen or dash without a space) or the word NOT (and a space) before a word to exclude that term from your results. NOT is especially useful for removing extraneous words or terms that get associated with a word you might be searching. For example, you might want to know about the vision package to find out whether glasses are covered for you this year, yet you keep getting corporate mission vision values items in your search results. Simply search vision package -mission to remove the bad results.
Quotes
Add quotation marks around a phrase to return results with exactly that phrase. For example, searching revenue projection will return results that include both words, but they could be anywhere in the result; however, “revenue projection” will only be in the results if the exact phrase exists. Add quotes around a single word to ensure a search term of multiple words will return results that include that word. For example, revenue projection q1 may return results from Q4 or Q3 of the previous year higher in relevance due to its earlier popularity. However, searching revenue projection “q1” will guarantee your results include the text “q1” in the result.
OR
Searching multiple words in Teams (or almost any online search engine) generally acts as a logical AND in between each word, meaning it looks for all the terms, regardless of how close they are to each other in the result. The more words you provide, the fewer results are available to show. However, sometimes, you want to cast a wider net. For those situations, you can use OR between words, which will surface results that include either of the terms you mention, rather than both. For example, searching online training (equivalent to online AND training) will return results that include both terms; however, searching online OR training will return results that include either or both terms, providing more results to look through.
Wildcard (*)
Place an asterisk at the end of a portion of a word to search multiple variations of that word. For example, including proj* in your search would return results that include project and projection (as well as other variations).
Put Them Together
The greatest results will come when you bring these and other KQL tools together into your searches regularly. For example, this is a perfectly valid search request: 2022 -2021 -2020 “health insurance” claim reimbursement form OR submi*. It should return results that include “form” or “submit” or “submission” for “health care” claim reimbursements that reference 2022 (but not 2021 or 2020). KQL can make a major difference in your search experience, and all of the tips on these pages work in Google and Bing as well.
Use Hashtags
Hashtags are something you’ve likely come across on Facebook and Twitter. They’re arbitrary terms following a # that people use to keep related messages together in an easily searchable way.
If you are familiar with Slack—a Teams chat competitor—you’ll know that it has included hashtags as a feature. Teams never officially has, though. But that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from them. By “tagging” messages with hashtags and later searching using that hashtag, you can guarantee you will only find the messages with those hashtags. This is a workaround, but a useful one.
Use Hashtags
In a private chat or channel conversation, before sending the message, include your hashtag. In this case, we used #AlwaysBeShipping.
Note: These steps are not case sensitive, though many people prefer you capitalize each word of a hashtag so they’re easier to read.
In the Teams search box, enter your hashtag (complete with the #). Press Enter to search.
In the search results, click Messages. You should see messages with those hashtags. Filter and sort using the tools provided.
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Why don’t I see all the results I expect?
This trick uses out-of-the-box Teams search to return a list of results that include a set of letters that’s so unique it’s unlikely it would exist elsewhere in standard language. However, if you use hashtags a lot, your results will be presented to you in an automatically filtered way. You’ll want to home in on the right result by using the filters provided in the search experience, especially the ones related to chat, channels, and dates.
Slash Commands
Slash commands are an express lane to common features and tools in Teams that don’t require you to do much clicking to get there. Slash commands can be used to start chats, make calls, see your unread activity, view your saved list, and set your status.
To use a slash command, type / in the Teams search box. You’ll immediately be shown a list of words you can type as an almost-keyboard-shortcut method of taking certain actions in Teams. Likely the most popular ones are /dnd, /brb, /busy, and other status-related ones—they’re quick and easy to remember—but /chat, /whatsnew, /who, and /goto can be really useful, the latter one especially so if you’re a member of a lot of Teams. A quick /testcall is also useful for making sure your audio and video devices are set up correctly before an important meeting. Not all slash commands are created equal—some appear to be a solution in search of a problem—but don’t let that undermine any of the others that are useful.
