- When you navigate to a SharePoint site,
you don't necessarily see everything that's on the site
featured here on the homepage
or listed over here on the left in the Quick Launch.
The site owner makes choices about which features
are available or are featured here,
and it's an important decision
because this is prime real estate.
Everyone who visits this site comes here
unless they go directly to a document library
or folder using a link that was sent to them.
So a site might have more than one document library.
I've seen sites that have five or six document libraries,
but this is the document library most people will use,
so it's featured here.
Sometimes you'll have many, many sets of lists.
Some of them might be featured on Quick Links
or shown on the page, but they won't all be featured here.
It's also possible that your site will have a lister library
that we really don't want most people to look at.
So there's no reason to put it here for them to find.
So what happens if you want to see
all the contents of the site?
There are two different ways to do it.
One way is to click on Site contents.
Now this Site contents link will take us to a page
that will show us the content of the site.
It'll show us the document, libraries, the lists, and so on.
You might sometimes go to a site where Site contents
has been removed from the Quick Launch
because the site owner really doesn't want people
poking around, and this makes it pretty easy
to get to Site contents.
If I click on Site contents,
I'll see everything on the site.
And you'll notice, for example, right at the top,
there's a Budget Documents library
that is not reflected in the Quick Launch.
We just need to either know it's there
or bookmark in our browser or search for it,
which is the thing we'll talk about next.
If we were on the home tab and there wasn't
a Site contents link listed here,
you might consider going to the Settings gear
because there's another Site contents link
that's a little harder for a site owner to get rid of.
So if I go to Site contents here,
it will take me to the same spot.
And this Site contents page has two tabs.
One is Contents and one is any sites that were created
that are subsites of this site.
This was the way we used to build SharePoint sites,
is we would build a site for service to sales.
And then if a team within service to sales needed a site,
we'd create it as a subsite.
That is not how we organize modern SharePoint sites,
but it's good to know if a site has Subsites
because it lets you know what all of the contents are.
A couple of other things I'll mention before we leave here,
if you delete something from a site,
it's sent to the site's Recycle binomial.
And so if we believe there are things that have been deleted
and we need to get them back,
then we'll click on the Recycle bin to go check them out.
We don't get separate recycle bins
for each of the document libraries for each of the list.
We get one recycle bin for each site.
And if I go to, Site contents,
I have a link to the recycle bin that's living right here.
If, as you're moving forward with SharePoint,
you decide to add a new list to a site,
it's important to first go to Site contents
and make sure someone else hasn't created that list already.
Anytime I want to check the total contents of a site,
including its Subsites, and have access to its Settings
and Recycle bin, Site contents gives me what I need.
The other way that we can locate content
in SharePoint is by using Search,
and there are three specific things to know about Search.
First, Search will only show results
that you have permission to see.
Second, because like everything else in SharePoint,
Search is customizable, your site may include lists
and libraries that you have permission to see,
even to edit, but they may specifically be excluded
from Search, and typically it will make sense
why they were excluded, if you think about it.
For example, you might have a customer list
that you don't want to have searched
except from within the list.
So the SharePoint administrator might have excluded that.
And finally, it matters where you search in SharePoint.
If I search here on the start page,
I am searching all of SharePoint.
But if I were to search, for example, in Residential Sales,
notice it says, Search to this site.
And if I search in a document library,
the search box will say, Search this library.
So it's always clear what it is you're searching
if you note the text that's in the search box
at the top of the page.
Your most expansive search is on the SharePoint search page,
which is searching everything you have permission
to see in SharePoint.
So if I know that a document I'm looking for
is in a particular library, for example,
if I know that it's in my Policy Review library,
it really behooves me to start by going to that site
and searching here or going to the document library itself
and searching here, not because it's faster to do that,
but because I won't have extra search results.
I won't have documents about policy
that aren't housed here in this site.
If I have access to 40 or 50 SharePoint sites,
it makes sense to try to limit the scope of my search
by going to my search location to begin with.
But let's go back to the SharePoint start page here,
our broadest-scoped search.
And I'm going to click on the box,
and before I even enter any text,
SharePoint is bringing up results
of things that I've touched recently.
And these come in groups.
These are sites I've been to recently,
files I've used recently,
people whose documents I have used
or who I have searched recently,
and then news stories that are recent.
So I get some information to begin with,
but if I want to look for something more specific,
then I click in the search box and I begin typing.
So I'm searching for someone, Rob Molina,
and notice that he comes up under People.
And if I click here, it will take me to information
about Rob with some search results from his work,
his contact information, his organizational information.
This is stuff being fed to me by Delve.
I can email him directly from here.
I could start a chat with him.
So I have lots of options of what I might do,
but maybe when I was searching for Molina,
I wasn't necessarily looking for just Rob.
I'm going to open my search results a little more.
And notice now that I'm on a search results page
that has tabs across the top.
This is everything about Robert.
Here are files that Robert has created
or modified or that contain the text Molina.
Here are sites, no results, people, probably just Rob,
news, there was actually a news story a couple of years ago
about Rob Molina, no images of Rob.
And we know we have one but it's in Delve,
it's in his profile.
And then we might have some Power BI information
provided by Rob, but we don't.
If I choose a new search here,
for example, residential, and I choose Show more results,
anytime I choose Show more results,
I'm going to be pitched to this page,
the search result page, which breaks it down by Files,
Sites, People, News,
two stories, Images and Power BI.
If I search again, this same search and I look at Files,
there is, for example, a report, a simple letter.
All of these have information about residential in them.
So if I were to click here, for example,
Solar Proposal with KIT,
I'd be taken to a PowerPoint presentation.
Therefore, it will automatically be opened up for me
by SharePoint in PowerPoint Online.
So it's a quick trip from the search box
directly into a document.
Here on the search results page,
depending on which particular link you're looking at,
Sites just shows you a list of sites,
but Files will actually let you filter them by file type.
So if I know what I'm looking for is a Word document,
I can apply that and simply see my Word documents.
I can also look at when they were last modified.
And if a document newly created, the modification date
and creation date are exactly the same.
So these dynamic filters allow me to narrow down
my search results when I have a lot of search results,
because I'm looking for perhaps a common term
in my organization and I need to filter,
either based on time or on file type.
Often when users are looking for something,
their first tendency is to browse
because that's how files were found
when they were stored in network shares.
But almost always, if you're looking for a document,
a person or a site in SharePoint,
the fastest way to get there is not to browse
but to use SharePoint Search.
(upbeat music)