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Searching for Filename Suffix in SharePoint – No Results Found

SueK 60 Reputation points
2025-08-19T16:19:58.1166667+00:00

We are building a SharePoint document management system that will contain policies and policy appendices as separate documents. In our filenaming convention we were hoping to have a suffix of a unique identifier for the policy so that when a policy was retired we could search for all the associated appendices to prevent orphan records. eg Policy259.docx with an appendix of Form259.docx. However it seems that if I do a search for filename:*259 it doesn't return any results but if I create documents where I put the identifier at the beginning of the file, (I want to avoid this if possible as its not user friendly), eg.259Policy.docx and 259Form.docx it will find the files. Am I missing something or do I need to have the identifier at the beginning of the filename? Is there no alternative?

Microsoft 365 and Office | SharePoint | Other | Android
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Hendrix-C 16,725 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator
2025-08-19T17:08:40.2266667+00:00

Hello @SueK, 

Thank you for reaching out to Microsoft Q&A Community.  

According to your concern, we want to share that SharePoint does not support suffix wildcard search, it only support for prefix matching. SharePoint search tokenizes content and metadata and it doesn't treat the filename as a searchable string in the same way traditional file systems do. Wildcards (*) are limited and often only work at the end of a term, not in the middle or beginning. That's why Policy259.docx and Form259.docx don't work but 259Policy.docx and 259Form.docx do. 

In this case, there are some alternatives that we suggest you consider try: 

  1. Use Metadata: it's like labels or tags you attach to a document. 
  • You create a column called Policy ID in your SharePoint library. 
  • When you upload a document, you fill in the Policy ID (e.g., 259). 
  • You can then search or filter by this ID to find all related documents 
  1. Use Document Sets: it let you group related documents (e.g., a policy and its appendices) and apply shared metadata to all of them. You can create a Document Set called Policy 259 and store Policy259.docx, Form259.docx, etc. Inside it.  

I hope the above information is helpful for you. If there's anything else I can help you with, please feel free to reach out again.  

Looking forward to your response.

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