title: How to make custom columns searchable in Sharepoint Office 365?
body: <p><strong>Our organization uses Office 365 with SharePoint Online (not on premise).</strong>  </p>
  
  <p><strong>Background/scope:</strong>
  I'm in the mist of a large document migration project, and I have nearly 30,000 files (along with metadata) to transfer to the SharePoint system.  I'm using the "Document Center" feature in SharePoint to accomplish this.    </p>
  
  <p>Copying the files over is not an issue.  Nor is updating the metadata for these files (i use MS Access to update the metadata/columns).  </p>
  
  <p><strong>The Wrinkle:</strong> What is an issue is the extra columns I've created in SharePoint for this library containing the metadata from the old system is not being searched thru.  They're just a few columns (<code>AccountNumber, OwnerFirstName, OwnerLastName, Description, and CompanyName</code>).   Each attribute is just a single line of text, and may contain duplicates or can be blank.  </p>
  
  <p><strong>THE PROBLEM IS...</strong> after I've updated the metadata for those columns, I want to be able to use the default search box in the document library to search thru those columns, but when I put in a search term that I know should produce results, I get no results.  See screen shots below:</p>
  
  <p><strong>Document Library: Default View, notice the columns</strong>
  <a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/6UlCo.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/6UlCo.png" alt="Document Library"></a>
  <strong>Search by Account Number: No results</strong>
  <a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/dOJ9l.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/dOJ9l.png" alt="Search by AccountNumber"></a>
  <strong>Search by Owner First Name: No results</strong>
  <a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/A4jF9.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/A4jF9.png" alt="Search by Owner First Name"></a>
  <strong>Search by Description or Title: No results</strong>
  <a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/rn9ee.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/rn9ee.png" alt="Search by Description/Title"></a></p>
  
  <p><strong>From my perspective, this should be extremely easy to fix, but I can not find the setting or the instructions on how to make the system search thru the new columns that I've added.</strong>  I've done a LOT of google searching, and reading Microsoft articles, but nothing like a STEP BY STEP guide to solve my issue.  I don't want to read a long winded story about the history of SharePoint columns or data management, I just want instructions on how to make it happen!  <em>Frustrated smile here</em></p>
  
  <p>I have full administrative access to this particular SharePoint site, so that should mean I have the required permission to affect search results and behavior, right?  Or am I suppose to wait for Indexing to happen at a certain timeframe?  <strong>Please help steer me into the right direction because I want to make sure that the files and the metadata columns I created that are associated with these files on this SharePoint Library are searchable before I start the actual full migration of 30,000 files.</strong></p>