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Search for Documents

Search for Documents

Searching returns a list of documents that match all your search terms. Search results are listed in order of the closest matches.

Required Editions

Available in: Salesforce Classic
Available in: All Editions except Database.com
User Permissions Needed
To view documents: Read on documents

To find specific documents, use the Find Document button on the documents home page.

  1. Click the Documents tab.
  2. Enter your search terms. Salesforce searches the following fields:
    • Document Name
    • Keywords
    • Description
  3. Click Find Document.

    The Keywords and Document Name fields are used to determine the closest matches. The fields you see are predefined and can’t be changed.

    Tip
    Tip To search for a phrase, use quotation marks around the words. For example, a search for “my logos” returns documents whose fields or content contains that exact phrase, and ones that contain my and logos. Without quotation marks, your search returns all documents that include any of the words in the search. For example, my logos returns documents whose fields or content contains my and logos.
  4. To go to the detail page for a document, select the document or click View.

If your administrator enables document content search, Salesforce also performs a full-text search of the document. When a new document is uploaded or an old one is replaced, its contents are available for searches.

Note
Note Salesforce automatically determines if the contents of a document can be searched. If the Document Content Searchable property is checked on a document, then its contents have been processed successfully and can be searched. If your document is large, it may take several minutes before Salesforce searches the contents of a document and marks the Document Content Searchable property.

You can also find documents using global search.

  • Enter your search terms in the header search box.
  • Select Search Options... from the dropdown and select Documents to narrow your search results.
  • Click Search.

The following file types are supported for a document content search.

Note
Note The contents of documents that exceed the maximum sizes are not searched; however, the document fields are still searched. Only the first 1,000,000 characters of text are searched. Text beyond this limit is not included in the search.
File Type File Extensions Maximum Size
HTML (only the text within a <body> tag) .htm, .html, .xhtml 5 MB
PDF .pdf 25 MB
PPT .pot, .pps, .ppt 25 MB
RTF .rtf 5 MB
Text .c, .cpp, .css.csv, .ini, .java, .log, .sql, .txt 5 MB
Word .doc, .dot 25 MB
XLS .xls, .xlt 5 MB, or a maximum cell limit of 100,000 cells
XML .xml 5 MB

In some instances documents aren’t searched. For example:

  • If a file extension is changed to a different format, it isn’t searched, even if both extensions are valid. For example, a .txt file that is renamed to .rtf isn’t searched.
  • PDF and Word documents may have security restrictions that prevent them from being searched. To ensure that the content is searchable, set the “content extraction” property on your file to “Enabled” when creating your document.
 
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