Dynamics 365 CE gives users three distinct ways to find records, and each works differently under the hood.

Quick Find

The search box inside a specific table’s grid. It only searches the columns configured on that table’s Quick Find view — if a column isn’t listed there, typing a value from it won’t return a match. This is the most common cause of “search isn’t finding my record” support tickets, and the fix is almost always adding the missing column to the Quick Find view’s find columns.

Categorized Search

The global search (usually a magnifying icon in the top nav) that searches across multiple tables at once, grouped by table in the results. Which tables and columns are included is configured centrally in system settings, not per-table.

Relevance Search

An optional, more powerful search built on Azure Search infrastructure, offering fuzzy matching, typo tolerance, and faceted filtering across tables — closer to a modern search engine experience than Categorized Search’s simpler matching. It needs to be explicitly enabled for an environment and has its own indexing behavior to be aware of (there’s a delay between a record changing and the search index catching up).

Picking the right one to recommend. For a small number of tables and straightforward needs, Categorized Search is usually enough. For larger datasets, multi-word/fuzzy queries, or when users complain that “search feels dumb,” Relevance Search is the right escalation — but it’s a tenant-level setting, so switching it on affects every environment’s search experience, not just one app.

Advanced Find

Not really a “search” in the same sense — Advanced Find is a query builder for constructing arbitrary filter conditions and saving the result as a personal or system view. It’s the tool power users reach for when they need something more specific than any existing view provides.