Searching

[YouBetcha]

Can anyone elaborate on how OneNote performs a search? It seems that it does
something of a contextual "smart" search. If I search for the word "apply"
it also finds "applies", "applied", etc. Which is usually fine. But
sometimes, you want a search that is "dumb," where searches for all instances
of a single string. It seems not to do this, unless the search string is at
the very beginning of the words being searched (I saw a post before where
someone searched for "111" but it didn't find it in "windows111").

So, what are the rules?

 

[Erik Sojka (MVP)]

That earlier thread (look for posts around April 26) seemed to show that it
is indeed a bug. It has been logged with MS.

Aside from that bug (i.e. that ON can't find substrings if at the middle or
end of a word), all text should be searchable within OneNote assuming that
your WDS index is up to date.

 

[YouBetcha]

I don't think that was a bug. I think that is just how they designed it.
From the help file:

"Use only the first few letters of a word to expand your search results If
you type the first few letters of a word, OneNote finds words that contain
that portion of the word. For example, if you type Tim and you have notes
that include the word time, OneNote finds notes that contain both Tim and
time. To avoid this, use quotation marks to search for an exact word or
phrase."

If it had wildcards, then this would help.