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Search and Filter cards on the board
Search and Filter cards on the board

This article will provide useful information about the Search and Filter feature in StoriesOnBoard

Tamás Párványik avatar
Written by Tamás Párványik
Updated over a week ago

Content:

Overview

This feature can be very useful for users who need to manage a large number of story cards on their maps. There are many variations available to get out the most of our search and find exactly the cards we would like to work on.

How can you access it?

You can access the search panel using the button on the menu bar, or by pressing the Ctrl + F keyboard shortcut (and the same Ctrl + F on Mac computers too):

Keyboard shortcuts:

You can also use some other shortcuts to use the feature like:

Tab (Shift + Tab to step back) - Navigate on the search panel
Cursor down - Open drop-down menu
Space - Mark checkboxes
F3 - Jump to the first highlighted card and cycle through the highlighted cards
Shift + F3 - Step backward on the highlighted cards
"Find next" and "Find previous" buttons are also can be used to navigate on highlighted cards.

Even if the search results are highlighted you can select other cards on the board by using the cursor keys or the mouse.  

Panel settings

Let's see the overview of the panel:

Below the search input field, there is a checkbox for "Search in description", that means the text content in the card's description will be included in the search. With the "Show / Hide filters" you can access the search type and search filters setup.

Search type

The first drop-down is filtering by time:

The second is by releases: 

The third is by card colors (more about custom colors in this article):

The fourth is by annotations:

And the last is by card statuses:

Search filters

In the filters section, there are many types of filtering options and combining them makes a large number of filtering variations:

After we have the search results, we have the option to collapse all the unrelated cards and releases for a better view of the results:

Reset settings

The "Reset" button on the bottom of the panel deletes all the filters. We can close the search panel even if we have the search results highlighted in this case Ctrl + Q will reset all the filters and get us back to the normal view of the board. 

Finally, I would like to recommend some handy use cases, picked from possible work situations.

Track actions


It is quite easy to track our own actions on cards (tasks) in a certain time period, but it's harder to see what our teammates did in the last week for example. In this case, we need to select "Past week" from the "Created or updated..." drop-down menu and check "Last updated by others" on the filters list. Like this, we will see all the cards edited or commented on by others last week highlighted on the board.
The same with "Commented by others" filter but in this case, we will only see the cards commented by others last week.
This method can be combined with the board's activity feed. Like this, we can easily track not just the cards changed but the type of changes exactly. As you can see the search results will remain if we go to the Activities tab. Then all we need to do is select one card from the results, click on the Filter button, and use F3 to cycle through them and we can see the actions made on the selected card on the right side.

Or let's say we have multiple teams (or persons) working on the same map and they are assigned by custom card colors. Then we can select "Filter by colors" from the drop-down menu and highlight the cards assigned to that team (or person). Of course, we can add or remove more filters at any time during the search.

If we have an estimation preset (story points for example) it is also easy to find large tasks to split them for more efficient work. If we check the "Has estimation" box an input field will appear where we can set the range of estimation units we would like to see.

In case we have an active Jira integration setup, the JIRA-KEY (Jira issue id) for linked cards will be included in the search.  

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg, the various combinations of the filters should give the opportunity to any user finding exactly what they need to see on their story maps.  


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