Follow the instructions below to learn how to take advantage of Workday's search functions to quickly find tasks, reports, and other information.
Workday Search
Search Basics
The search box is always centered at the top of the screen in Workday. Any task you access through a Workday application can also be accessed by searching for the name of the task.
Tasks in Workday tend to follow a naming convention. Tasks usually begin with one of the following words: change, maintain, find, create, or edit. When you don’t know the full name of a task, try to search for just the noun or subject. For example, if you were searching for the task "Change Emergency Contacts," you could search for just "Emergency" or "Contact" and omit the verb.
Workday search allows you to enter full or partial words for a search. For example, to find the task "Change My Emergency Contacts," you could type abbreviations of each word, "Cha Eme Conta" and Workday would successfully find the task.
- Note: Unlike internet search engines, Workday does not return results on misspelled words. In the above example, if you typed "emergncy," instead of "emergency," you would not receive any results.
If the result you are searching for isn't in the drop down menu that appears, click the View More option at the bottom of the list to see additional results.
On the search results page that follows, results are organized into categories. Workday automatically displays all results related to your Saved Categories. To see more results, click on the caret arrow next to More Categories to expand the sidebar menu.
To change your default saved search categories, you can use the Configure Search tool at the bottom left of the search results screen. This process is described in detail in the next section.
Customizing your search results
Workday automatically displays all search results in categories related to your Saved Categories. You can add categories that are relevant to your job duties to this section to improve your search results. Once added, you will not need to open the More Categories menu to reveal search results in those categories.
- Start by typing in a search term, then press the the enter key or click View More to navigate to the search results list.
- Next, click the Configure Search button in the lower left corner of the screen.
- A window will pop up. Under the More Categories list, click and drag any categories you would like to save, pulling them up to the Saved Categories section.
- Click Save when you are finished.
Using search prefixes
Search prefixes are words or abbreviations followed by a colon (:), which can be used to narrow the categories you are searching within. If you know the type of object you’re looking for in Workday, you can find it more quickly by entering a search prefix before your search term. For example, if you want to find an employee named Xia Skinner, you could use the prefix “Worker:” by typing “Worker:Skinner.” You can search for a location by using the prefix "loc:" as in "loc:Skinner". The image below shows an example of how using prefixes can improve search results.
If you choose to use search prefixes, be sure to type the prefix exactly. Always follow a prefix with a colon and then your search criteria. You can find a complete list of search prefixes by typing a question mark (?) into the search bar and pressing enter.