Searching for Documents in SharePoint Online

So you’ve uploaded all your documents into SharePoint, but now how do you find them? Back in the nested folder structure world, you’d simply navigate through levels such as Department > Project > Year to find what you’re looking for. But now in SharePoint, we have documents spread across multiple sites, so where do you start?

1. Document Library search

If you know that your file is somewhere in a specific document library, then your best bet is to use the Document Library search.

Simply navigate to the relevant document library and use the search bar. When you are in a specific document library, the search will only display results from that document library.

2. Site Search

If you know that your file is in a specific site, but are unsure of which document library it resides in, then you should execute a Site Search which will search all document libraries at once.

To do this, navigate to your site and use the search bar. Using the search bar when you are in a specific site will display results from the site you are in.

3. Hub Search

Assuming you have created a hub, you can perform a search from the Hub parent site to yield results from all sites associated with the hub.

Since you are searching multiple sites, your results at this level will also include news and pages, as well as documents.

4. SharePoint wide search

From the SharePoint start page, you can execute a global search across all SharePoint sites in your environment, whether they are linked to a hub or not. It also searches your OneDrive for Business (private) files as well!

To get to the SharePoint start page, simply click the SharePoint Start Page icon in the app bar, or click the app launcher and select SharePoint: