Module 6 of StartCloud's Microsoft 365: Everyday Skills learning pathway, in five short units with a knowledge check: searching across email, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams at once instead of hunting folder by folder, naming files so future you can find them (dates that sort, no final_v3), the Recent and Shared views that beat any folder, and why a deep folder tree stopped being the right answer once search got good.
Finding It Again
Ask once, instead of hunting folder by folder
Think about the last time you went looking for a document. There is a good chance you opened a folder, then another folder, then a third, decided it was probably in the other place, went there, came back, and eventually found it about four minutes later in the first place you looked.
That is not a memory problem. It is what happens when you navigate to things instead of asking for them. Microsoft 365 has a single search that reaches across your email, your OneDrive, the SharePoint sites you belong to and your Teams files, all at once, and it is sitting in the bar at the top of nearly every app you use. Ask once, rather than hunting in six places.
This is the question everyone is too polite to ask, so here it is answered. Searching does not give you access to anything, and it never shows you files you were not already allowed to open. Payroll stays invisible to you, and your half-written resignation letter stays invisible to everyone else. Search reads permissions, it does not change them.
That is not a fault. Results are ranked around you: what you have access to, what you have been working on lately, and who you work with most. It is why a colleague swearing they found it in two seconds is not much help to you, and why your own results tend to get better the more you use it.
The words in a Word document, a PDF, a spreadsheet, the body of an email, all of it is searchable. So if you cannot remember what a file was called but you remember a phrase in it, or the client's name, or the job number, that is genuinely enough to go on.
Alongside each result you get who changed it last, when they changed it, and where it lives. That is usually how you pick between three files with almost the same name, and it is information a folder listing never gave you.
Search pays attention to where you are standing when you ask. Search from inside Outlook and you get email, because that is what is around you. Search from inside a SharePoint site and you get that site's pages and files. If you want the whole lot at once, search from the Microsoft 365 start page in your browser, the one that shows your recent files when you sign in. So when a search comes back with nothing and you are certain the thing exists, the first question is not "what did I call it", it is "where was I standing".