DunneNote · Tutorial

Find anything

Use Plain search, then Advanced search with patterns, field qualifiers, tags and filters.

Available15 min· Intermediate· DunneNote 0.9.2

In this tutorial you'll go from typing a word to writing precise queries that find a single table cell. You'll also set up a tag with an alias.

You'll need#

A notebook with a few pages of content, including at least one table. The expenses.csv table from Working with tables is ideal.
Somewhere in your text, the word "invoice". Type it into a Rich Text canvas if it isn't there already.

Choose Search on the app rail. The search bar opens in Plain mode.
Type invoice. Results from this notebook appear.
If you have photos in the notebook, type picture 2024 (use a year your photos were taken). Plain mode treats "picture" as a kind and 2024 as a year, so it finds pictures taken that year.

Select a page, open the Item inspector from the app rail, and add the tag Texas under Tags.
Choose Tags on the app rail, select Texas, and add the alias TX.
Search for TX in Plain mode. The page tagged Texas is found.

Switch the search bar to Advanced.
Type *inv?ice*. The builder shows treating '*inv?ice*' as a pattern, and the results include "invoice", "Invoice" and "INVOICES". Case is ignored, and ? stands for exactly one character.
Type cell:[0-9]*. Only table cells that start with a digit match. Choose a result: the page opens, the row scrolls into view, and that exact cell is highlighted.
Type column:*date* to find columns with "date" in their name.
Combine terms: invoice -draft finds "invoice" but not "draft", and tag:texas kind:page finds only pages with that tag.
Type kind:bogus. You get no results and a message explaining why. Advanced search never silently ignores a filter it can't honour.

If you prefer Advanced mode, go to Settings ▸ General ▸ Search and choose Advanced. The search bar will open in that mode from then on.

Plain mode is forgiving: it recognises dates, kinds and tags for you.
Advanced mode adds AND, OR, -exclude, filters such as kind:, tag: and date:, and glob patterns.
Patterns ignore case and match the whole value. Wrap them in * to match anywhere.
cell:, column:, title:, body:, caption: and alt: narrow a pattern to one kind of field, and a cell match takes you to the exact cell.

Something unclear or out of date? Open a support ticket.