Global search

Global search is a powerful search tool to quickly search for a specific record, such as an inpidual customer or transaction. It operates like a Google search throughout your NetSuite database, and returns any record that contains a given search term:

Autosuggest on global search

As you can see in the preceding screenshot, a global search doesn't differentiate whether it's a customer, vendor, item, or opportunity; it returns all records containing the search term. Therefore, depending on the search, the results can be substantial, and it can be very difficult to go through all of them to find the one record you are looking for. To solve this, NetSuite provides a way to limit search results to specific records, by using global search prefixes. Using the search prefix cu: before the search term will limit the results to customers. The prefix sa: will only return sales orders:

Global search with customer prefix

On the other hand, you can expand a search result by using wildcards. Let's suppose that I'm searching for a contact named Micky Mouse. He could be recorded in the database as Mickey, Michael, Mike, Mick, and so on. So, I would use a search term to encompass all of the possible variations. I would use the search term cu: mi% mouse. The % is the wildcard that will return all possible letters to represent the %.