Governance & Administration - Tenant Settings: Searching

With all the Fabric announcements in the last months, some of the Admin announcements might have slipped through. As you might know, the Admin part of Fabric is dear to my heart. I've posted about it earlier here, here, here, and here, to name a few 😀.

So in the next weeks I am going to highlight a few things with short, informative posts.

You can find other posts in the series here:

• Fabric (Tenant Settings) API's
• Tenant settings: Visual Cues

Searching - The Old Way

You probably also use the same method as I did to search through the Admin portal and tenant settings: CTRL + F from your browser. It does the trick, but not very well. 

For example, it only searches the titles of the settings, not the descriptions.

Next to that, you also can get a lof matches that you have to scroll or loop through, which makes it not very clear because more often than not, you don't know in what section of the tenant settings you ended up.

Searching - The New Way

Keyword-Based filtering to the rescue!

Last year Microsoft introduced the option to use Enhanced Keyword-Based Filtering.

First thing I'd like to mention: don't confuse the new search box (highlighted in red), with the (old) global search bar on the top (highlighted in blue). 😀

The new search box provides a few benefits to the old way of CTRL+F-searching:

• When you start typing it live filters the tenant settings with results to your search
• The results will still keep the subsections of the settings
• With the search, the descriptions of the settings are also taken into account, as you can see with the 3rd arrow in the screenshot above

One thing to keep in mind, sometimes you need to know what the exact term is that you have to search on:

• By searching for preview, you see all settings that are in preview (obviously 😏)
• If you're looking for all settings related to B2B, search for guest
• If you're looking for endorsements, try searching for "certifi", this includes both certification and certified

To complete the overview: the blue global search bar is a way to search your whole Power BI/Fabric tenant.

Feedback

I do have one suggestion for the product team:

• I think it would help if that search box will always stay on the top of my visible window.

What I often do is scroll down because I (think I) know where the setting that I'm looking for is located 😀 After a while I figure out it's not exactly where I thought it was, so I decide to use the search box instead. But then I first have to scroll back up before I see and can use the search box.

Conclusion

Going forward, I'll recommend using the new search box provided at the top of the Tenant settings page. It makes it easier to search through the settings. Especially when Microsoft keeps adding new tenant settings every month, that list will only grow bigger!