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Putting all your documents in one place is good as long as you can find them when you need them. Let's reinforce why efficient searching is so important.

On Aconex, there are projects that have millions of documents in their document registers. Just pressing Search and then scrolling through page after page of results will be painful at best. It's not good enough to find documents eventually. That can result in delays and frustration. We need to make it easier.

In another lesson, we looked at document fields. Remember, these are tags we apply to each document that's added to the project. These are the key elements to search for and find documents quickly and efficiently. Let's jump into Aconex to explain more.

Using the document fields helps reduce the number of documents displayed in the search results. Let's look at this again. Just hitting Search displays a large number of documents.

In this example, it's not too bad. But on a real project, that number could be in the tens of thousands, maybe more. We need to make that number smaller and more manageable. And we do that by selecting some criteria from the fields.

Here we'll use the Discipline and Type fields to search for all the mechanical drawings. Starting with mechanical from the Discipline field, now the number is smaller. Then, we'll select Drawing from the Type field. Now the number of documents is much smaller, much more manageable.

In this way, we can much more efficiently locate the information we're looking for using the fields. Plus, Aconex only allows you to search for the tagged information that actually exists in your document register. And that means you can't search for something that doesn't exist. Of course, each project will be different, and the criteria that you search on will vary.

Sometimes, the documents we're looking for can be tricky to locate, even after we've used the various document fields. Often, we might know just part of the document title or description, for example. And that's where the Search box can help. In fact, it's one of the most common ways people locate their documents.

Let's start with everything in the Document Register. Remember, this is a very small project compared to some of our projects as we only have a few hundred results. We'll start off by just using a single keyword, fire.

This will search for the word fire across all the document fields. And you can see that this has reduced the number of search results drastically. Let's clear the search and use another keyword. Let's try kitchen. Again, now we've got a much more manageable list of documents.

Now, keep in mind that very common words will likely produce a larger number of search results. And we can also use more than one keyword. We'll use lobby and lounge. Again, this has helped reduce the list of documents.

One final search. This time, we'll use keywords with the document fields. Let's use the document Type field to display shop drawings and use lobby as a keyword. Now we have just a few documents. That's much easier to manage.

It doesn't take much practice to become good at searching for documents. And once you know how, finding what you need when you need it is so easy.