Getting Started

You know the record exists. You are not sure how it is spelled, which table it is on, or whether you typed the words in the right order. Business Central's own search wants an exact match. Universal Search does not.

Find it even when you are not sure how it is typed

Open the Universal Search page directly, or type a related term, "search," "find," "google," "fuzzy," or "universal," into Business Central's Tell Me bar and pick it from there. Type at least two characters; results update a moment after you stop typing.

The search above is just "con." No table picked, no exact spelling required, and matches already show up grouped by table with chips above them.

Type the words in any order, with any spacing

You do not have to type words in the order they appear on the record, or get the spacing exactly right.

• Typing words in a different order than the record still matches. A record does not need to start with the first word you typed.
• Extra or missing spaces do not break a match: typing "icecream" as one word still finds a record stored as "Ice Cream," and typing it with a space finds a record stored without one.

Stop typing as soon as you recognize it

You do not need to finish typing a word. Typing the start of a name matches anything that begins with it, so you can stop as soon as you see the record you want in the list.

Find it even when you type it wrong

A word that is slightly misspelled still finds the record. A small typo, an extra letter, a swapped letter, a missing letter, in the first word you type does not stop a match.

Universal Search also finds a match buried in the middle of a word, not just at the start.

Typing "maro orp," shown above, still finds Omaroon Corporation. "maro" sits inside "Omaroon" and "orp" sits inside "Corporation." Universal Search matches when every fragment you typed shows up somewhere in the record, in any order.

Tip: "tani" finds "Itani" the same way, a fragment in the middle of a name, not the start.

Find names that sound alike but are spelled differently

For fields with phonetic matching turned on, Universal Search finds names that sound alike even when the spelling does not match. "Carl" and "Karl" match each other, and other common sound-alike spellings behave the same way.

Narrow down a busy result list

A search across every configured table at once is useful, but sometimes you already know the table. Chips make that quick:

• After you search, a row of chips appears above the results: All, plus one chip per table with a match, each labeled with its live count, for example Customer (12).
• Click a chip to isolate that table. Click All to go back to the mixed view.
• A chip filter sticks while you keep the same search text, so you can switch chips as many times as you like without retyping. Changing what you typed resets the view to All, so you never end up quietly searching the wrong table.

In the mixed "All" view, results are grouped by table and capped per table, so one large table cannot crowd out the smaller ones. A group header like "Item, showing 5 of 42, view all" tells you there is more, and clicking it isolates that table the same way its chip would.

If there are more results than fit on the page, a Show more results link appears below the list. Click it to load another page of the same search without retyping anything.

Open the record

Click any result to open it directly on its card or list page, the same page you would navigate to manually. From the keyboard, use the up and down arrow keys to move through the list and Enter to open the selected result.

Note: Universal Search only ever shows records you already have permission to read. If a table is missing from the chips, or a record you expect never appears, either the table is not configured for indexing yet (see Configuration), or your user does not have read access to it.