How do I write a good search query?

Search is your central entry point – it finds emails, documents, images and chat messages all at once.

In 3 steps

Search normally: keywords or a whole question, both work. "travel expense policy PDF" works just as well as "Which specification applies to the CNC machine at the Cologne site?".
Too many hits? Narrow it down: use an operator, not different words.
Still too many? Filter: by file type, data source, time period or language.

The five operators

Operator	Syntax	Effect
Exact	`"Q1 sales campaign"`	only this phrase, in this order
Wildcard	`project*`	every term that starts this way
Exclude	`-clientname`	excludes a term, no space after the minus
File type	`type:xlsx costing`	also `suffix:`; needs the extension, not "Excel"
Author	`author:"Max Mustermann"`	quotation marks for full names

Both filter operators also work inverted: project plan -type:pdf or customer satisfaction -author:Erika Schmidt.

The four filters

Good to know

Quotation marks force an exact spelling – "groundwater" then won't find "groundwaters". Only use them once you're sure how the term appears in the document.
Two colleagues see different results for the same search. That's down to your access rights, which carry over into amber unchanged
If you can't find a document at all, it's often a scanned PDF without text recognition. There's a dedicated search for scanned documents.

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