Finding and working · Chapter 9
Searching and finding
The archive is built so that you find that one letter in three years. The search looks not only at titles and senders but through the whole recognised text, the notes and the tags. Parts of words work too, and upper or lower case does not matter. If you no longer remember the rest, a filter helps.
A search, step by step
- Open the archive
Click “Archive” in the bar. At the top is the search field with the hint “Search titles, senders and the whole text”.
- Type something
When the washing machine gives up, you type “washing machine”. You do not have to press Enter, the search starts as soon as you stop typing for a moment. Above the list it says how many there are and how long the search took, for example “3 hits for “washing machine” in 0.04 seconds”.
- Look at the hit
Each hit shows a piece of the text with the word that was found marked. If the hit came from a note, it says “in a note”. A click opens the document.
- Clear the search
The small cross in the search field (“Clear the search”) takes you back to the list by month.
How the search treats words
- Every word must be found. “energy 2026” finds only documents where both appear, wherever and in whatever order.
- Parts of words work too. “ergy” finds “Energy”. From three letters on, a part of a word matches anywhere in the word; shorter ones have to stand at the beginning of a word.
- Upper and lower case, accents and ß do not matter. “strasse” also finds “Straße”.
- An exact run of words you put in quotation marks:
"please transfer".
There is no search that forgives typing mistakes or knows synonyms. If you type “washign machine”, you find nothing. When a part of the word will do, use it: “washin”.
Search words in the search line
With small additions in the search line you narrow down while you search. They work in English and in German and can be mixed with words. A value with a space goes in quotation marks, for example sender:"Dr Sommer".
| You write | It looks for |
|---|---|
kind:invoice or art:rechnung | Documents whose kind begins like that |
sender:hansa or absender:hansa | Documents whose sender contains that |
tag:car | Documents with a tag that begins like that |
amount:>100 | An amount over 100 euros |
amount:<50.5 or betrag:<50,5 | An amount under 50.50 euros |
amount:=12.30 or amount:12,30 | Exactly this amount |
An example: kind:invoice sender:wiesental amount:>100 2026 looks for invoices from Wiesental Energy over 100 euros that also contain “2026”. If you click into the empty search field, a small help opens under “How searching works”, with six examples you can tap. A search may be up to 500 characters long and have up to twelve terms.
Narrowing down with filters
Next to the search field is the button “Filter”. It shows how many filters apply at the moment, for example “Filter (2)”. The filters narrow the list even without a search word.
- Vault. At the top are “All vaults”, your vaults and “Shared with me” for everything that was shared with you one by one.
- “Kind”, “Sender” and “Tag” you pick from the entries that exist.
- “Belongs to” shows only the documents of one particular person.
- “Time” knows the current year, the year before as a number, “Last 12 months” and “Any time”. It means the date on the document.
“Reset the filters” takes them all away again. The filters also work on the export: what you see you can pack as a ZIP with “Export” (chapter Tax adviser).
Reading the archive without a search
Without a search word the archive shows all the documents you may see, ordered by month. Older months load as you scroll, or with “Load more”. At the top you switch between “List” and “Tiles”; which view applies on opening you set under “My account”, tab “Look”. Small marks on a document show that it is “with a note”, “shared with people” or released as a “link to the outside”.
Good to knowThe search is fast. In a test with 200,000 invented documents on a development machine it found a rare word in about 0.15 seconds and a common one in up to 1.4. The database with text and search index grows by about 21 KB per document, so a household with 1,000 documents a year ends up with about 210 megabytes after ten years. In the inbox, by the way, the field “Search title or sender” also searches the text, the notes and the tags.