Getting More Out of Browsing with Filters

New filtering options in the Browse pages make it easy to zero in on content you like.

When you browse People, Places, Content, or Bookmarks, you have a number of options for narrowing down to what interests you. Start by typing a keyword in the text box and waiting for the results to refresh.

Keep in mind that every browse page has two sets of tabs and you can move between them to filter results. The tabs on the left define the browsing results in relation to you, as shown in the following graphic. For example, when you browse content you can choose whether to browse everything or only content you authored or participated in. Or, when you're browsing bookmarks, you can choose whether to see only your own bookmarks or to browse other people's public bookmarks.

As shown in the following graphic, tabs on the top let you limit your view to certain types of information. For example, you can limit content to just blog posts or discussions. Space browsing can be narrowed to just spaces, groups, or projects.

You can then use the keyword, tag, and filter options to refine your search even further. (Tag filtering only works if the content is tagged.) Suppose you want to find last April's East Coast sales report. Here are a couple of ways you could start hunting using Browse:

Browse to the Content page and type in Sales Report. Then click the arrow under "Sort by Recent Activity" and sort the results instead by Date Created. By default, the most recent results are shown first.
Browse People to find the name of the Sales director. Then browse from his profile's Content tab, selecting Authored from the left-hand menu and Documents from the top menu to show only the documents he wrote. You can filter these further by keyword or tag if he's an especially productive content creator.

Where Was That Thing I Can't Quite Remember?

Suppose you can't remember the name. date, or author of what you're looking for? This happens all the time in busy communities. Complex browsing is especially useful for these situations. For example, if you remember having a discussion about how to increase customer survey engagement some time in the last three months, but not what space it happened in, who the other participants were, or what the outcome was, you could use the keyword or tag "survey." Then use the left menus to narrow to "Participated" and the top menu to narrow to "Discussions" so you don't need to see results from blogs, documents, or polls.

Tip: Sometimes conversations happen in document or blog comments, so you might look there next if you don't find a discussion when you expect to.