Tip: Search for Unknown NetSuite Drop Down Data

This article is relevant if you seek to enhance your day-to-day NetSuite use and be deemed a “power user”.

Background

NetSuite released version 2014.2 which included a major facelift to the user interface.  During the transition, some of the behavior to HTML drop down controls have changed.  What you may notice is that some drop downs have a standard iconic arrow that supplies a list.  Other drop downs, designed for larger lists, allow you to type in a few characters to help lookup related filter values.

Since my team and I heavily use Timesheets in our NetSuite Systems Integration practice, we are frequently navigating the timesheet forms to capture records.  A change of drop down behavior recently appeared which I suspect is a byproduct of the new 2014.2 upgrade.  In the pre 2014.2 timesheet world, you would select a Customer field and then the project task drop down would appear presenting the different project tasks available to record time.  In pre 2014.2, the list was a standard small list drop down and was perfectly appropriate because a project would typically only have a few tasks (at least in the way we setup projects in our practice).  In the 2014.2 version, the drop down is now forced to be a large list dropdown that requires search.  If you don’t know what the name of the task is, it takes two clicks to get to the list (one to open up a menu option, and another to select the ‘List’ option to draw the data).  This is cumbersome when you are in the application frequently.

Use NetSuite Search Like Operator

One of our consultants reminded me that I could use the “%” search operator to help lookup NetSuite data.  In the case of that drop down, if you place a percentage sign and hit tab, you will get a drop down list of data.   See image for example.   What is great about this is that you can use the “%” symbol when you can’t remember the name but you remember a fragment.  For example, in the example provided here, if you search with “%plan”, you would get a hit for two options.

I am going to file a support case with NetSuite about this specific behavior to hopefully get back to the small list drop downs.  In the meantime, I will quickly adapt by using the “%” symbol in my lookups.