Searching in Laserfiche

Searching is one of the fastest and most effective ways of locating a document. You can perform a variety of different kinds of searches in Laserfiche, and combine those searches to pinpoint exactly the document you need. To do that, click on the magnifier icon in the Folder Viewer and select the types of search you would like to perform, as explained in the below section.

Main Search Types

Date

You can search for documents with specific created/modified date within a specific period.

Electronic Documents

This search allows you to specify whether you want to retrieve electronic documents or non-electronic Laserfiche documents. If you click on Search for the following extensions, you can specify the electronic document types you wish to be returned.

Field

The Field search searches the template fields of documents in your repository. If you select a template from the list but do not type anything in the fields, the search will return all documents with that template. If you select a template and type a word or phrase in one of the fields, the search will return documents if they have the selected template and have a template field value matching that which you input. If you type search terms in more than one field, the search will return documents only if their template field values match all of the values you input.

Name

The Document/Folder Name search searches for the name of an entry. You can specify whether you wish to search for documents or folders by selecting the Document or Folder boxes. You can select both to locate both documents and folders. (This search will also return shortcuts: document shortcuts are returned in document search, and folder shortcuts are returned in folder search). Document and folder name search are useful if you know the name or part of the name of the document you are looking for.

Pages

This search type allows you to specify whether you want to retrieve documents with no pages or documents with pages. If you click on Do not contain pages, you will retrieve electronic documents that have neither had images printed with Snapshot nor have had text extracted from them; you will also retrieve any empty documents that do not contain TIFF images or text. If you click on Contain image or text pages, you will return all documents that have TIFF image pages, all documents that have extracted or OCRed text, and all electronic documents that have had images printed with Snapshot.

Tags

The Tags search allows you to find all documents with a particular tag. If you use an informational tag to specify which documents are urgent, for instance, you could use a Tag search to find all urgent documents.

Text

The Text search performs a full-text search of the text portions of all documents within your repository. You can use the Text search to locate documents containing specific key words. The search will return all documents which contain the specified word or words.

There are some additional options for your text search:

• AND search: allows you to find all documents that contain both of two words or phrases.
• OR search: allows you to find all documents that contain one or both of two words or phrases.
• NOT search: allows you to find all documents that contain one word or phrase but do not contain another word or phrase. This is useful for narrowing the focus of your search.
• WITHIN search: finds all instances of two words or phrases within a certain number of words of each other.
• Fuzzy search: can be used in conjunction with any of the above searches. Fuzzy searches locate both the exact matches to the search terms you provide and partial matches, where a certain number or percentage of letters in the result can differ from the search term. Fuzzy searches are useful to account for any errors in OCR, uncertainty about the spelling of a word or name, words or names that may be misspelled in the document, or inflected versions of words (such as “swim” and “swam”).

User

This search type allows you to find all documents and folders created by a particular user. It will also return shortcuts created by that user.

Versions

This search type allows you to search for a particular word or phrase within version comments. You can also specify that the search should only return the latest version of a document. If a document is not part of a version group and therefore has no versions, it will also be returned.

Within Folder

The Within Folder search type is unique in that it cannot be used on its own; it must be combined with another search. In effect, the Within Folder search is a constraint on other searches: it will return only documents that both fit the criteria of the other search and that are in the specified folder.

Click the '…' button to browse to the folder. If you select the Search subfolders box, the search will also return results from the selected folder's subfolders.

You may also change the Within in the drop-down menu to Not in to exclude folders and subfolders.