Searching Best Practices

Salesforce contains all of the contacts (students, staff, alum, prospects) and organizations (companies) with whom our programs engage and all data associated with those entities. If you are looking for information for a contact or organization, you can search using multiple methods.

Salesforce Classic Searching Tips (video)

Search Pin (important!)

If you would like to include /exclude specific objects within your search, you will need to "Pin" the objects to your main search menu.

• 1. Click the "Search" button in the top menu (do not include any content in the search bar)

• 1. Objects displayed under the "Records" folder will be search automatically. Any objects not showing here will not be included in a search.

• • • • To remove: hover over the record name, click the Pin icon, and select "unpin"

• • • • To add: click "Search all" at the bottom, hover over the record name, and click the Pin icon

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Basic Search

Begin your search using the native Search bar in the Salesforce menu. You can try searching by:

• • Full Record Name or uNID

  • (e.g. "Mickey Mouse" or "u8675309" for a contact or "Disney World" for an organization)

Advanced Search

Sometimes contacts or organizations may have a slightly different name than you are expecting (do you know someone named Robert that goes by Bob?). Advanced search can help find these records.

• • Use Wildcards (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.to search partial record names

    • • • Use an asterisk (*) to find items that match zero or more characters at the middle or end of your query.

        • (e.g. "Mickey M*" or "M* Mouse" - this is useful if you are unsure how to spell the name)

        • Use a question mark (?) to find items that match only one character at the middle or end of your query.

        • Use more specific search terms to get more relevant results. For example, to find all occurrences of prospect, including the plural prospects, use "prospect*". Using a partial term like "prosp*" could return unintended matches, like matches for "prosperity". Search terms that are too general may also take longer to return results.

  • Use Logical Operators (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. to combine multiple criteria into a single searchAND - search for items that match all of the search terms.

• • • • AND NOT - search for items that don't contain the search term.

      • OR - search for items containing at least one of the search terms.

      • Parenthesis - group search terms together (grouped search terms are evaluated before other terms in your string).

      • Quotation marks - search for items that match all of the search terms in the order entered.

• • If you know what type of record you are searching for

• • • 1. Restrict your search to a specific object

      2. Search within specific fields in the object