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1.3 Navigation & Search Techniques

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Workday Pro Platform Administrator Certification Study Guide Exam

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1 Chapter 1: The Workday Platform

1.1 Workday Products, Functional Areas & Product Touchpoints 1.2 The Object Management Model & Business Objects 1.3 Navigation & Search Techniques 1.4 Organizations in Workday

2 Chapter 2: Tenants & Release Management

2.1 Tenant Types & Tenant Management Tasks 2.2 Releases, Adoption, System Testing & Support

3 Chapter 3: The Configurable Security Framework

3.1 Components of the Configurable Security Framework 3.2 Core Security Group Types: Workday-Assigned, User-Based & Role-Based 3.3 Advanced Security Group Types

4 Chapter 4: Security Policies, Assignment & Troubleshooting

4.1 Domain Security Policies & Permissions 4.2 Assigning Roles & Security Group Membership 4.3 Troubleshooting Security Access Issues

5 Chapter 5: Business Process Definitions & Steps

5.1 The Business Process Framework & Definitions 5.2 Business Process Step Types 5.3 Step Configuration, Order & the Completion Step

6 Chapter 6: BP Security, Condition Rules & Troubleshooting

6.1 Business Process Security Policies 6.2 Creating & Testing Condition Rules 6.3 Using Reports to Troubleshoot Business Processes

7 Chapter 7: Report Foundations & Custom Reports

7.1 Business Objects, Fields, Related Business Objects & Data Sources 7.2 Standard Reports, Custom Report Types & the Report Writer 7.3 Worklets, Dashboards & Sharing Reports

8 Chapter 8: Calculated Fields, Alerts & Report Administration

8.1 Identifying & Maintaining Calculated Fields 8.2 Configuring & Testing Alerts 8.3 Scheduling Reports, Report Groups & Transferring Ownership 8.4 Troubleshooting Report Data & Access Issues

9 Chapter 9: Integration Architecture & Security

9.1 Workday Integration Architecture & Web Services 9.2 Workday Integration Tools & Choosing the Right One 9.3 Integration System Users & Integration System Security Groups

10 Chapter 10: Enterprise Interface Builders

10.1 Creating & Launching an Inbound EIB 10.2 Creating & Launching an Outbound EIB 10.3 Troubleshooting EIB Data Loads & Access Issues

1.3 Navigation & Search Techniques

Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI

Workday search returns tasks, reports, and business object instances, and results are always filtered by the searching user's security permissions.

Predictive Search needs at least three characters, treats each term separately, and works best with specific nouns rather than verbs such as find, edit, maintain, or create.

Search prefixes narrow results to one object type - org, sup, bp, loc, and field are common - and typing a question mark in the search box returns the full list of prefixes.

Synonyms map your organization's vocabulary onto Workday terminology and are maintained with the Edit Tenant Setup - Search task.

Proxy is a non-production testing tool: policies can be configured in any environment except Production, only unconstrained security groups can be granted proxy, and Workday evaluates proxy rules in order from most to least restrictive.

Last updated: August 2026

Navigating Workday Home

The Workday Home landing page is a curated entry point rather than a fixed menu. The pieces an administrator needs to recognize:

  • Element What it does
  • Global Navigation menu Quick access to the user's Workday applications and worklets
  • Search bar Finds tasks, reports, and business object instances
  • Notifications Business process notifications and rule-driven alerts (birthdays, time off)

My Tasks The action inbox. All Items is the live activity stream; Archive shows completed actions and business process statuses from the last 90 days

  • Announcements Carousel items configured through the Maintain Dashboards report
  • Workday Assistant Natural-language chatbot for retrieving information and completing tasks

My Tasks is where business process work lands. You can search it, save searches, apply filters (Favorites, Overdue, All To Dos), build your own filters with condition rules through Manage Filters , and use the Bulk Approve tab when several approvals are waiting.

The Worker Profile menu

Selecting your photo opens the Worker Profile menu. Three entries matter disproportionately for administrators:

Workbench - a landing page giving technical administrators and implementers direct access to the tools for creating and managing custom reports, calculated fields, analytic indicators, and administrative tasks. If you are hunting for a reporting tool and cannot recall its name, start here.

Sitemap - a list of the standard reports and tasks available to you, sorted by functional category. Useful precisely because it is scoped to your security.

Audit - a list of all audit reports and tasks available to you, sorted by functional area.

Also present: My Account (password and preferences), Drive (central file storage), My Reports (the virtual drive that holds generated report output), Favorites , Documentation (opens the Administrator Guide), and Help , whose target URL you set with Edit Tenant Setup - System .

Related Actions: the most-used control in Workday

The Related Actions icon next to an object opens the menu of tasks and reports available for that object. Nearly every configuration path in this exam runs through it - editing a business process definition, editing a domain security policy, scheduling a report, transferring report ownership.

Diagnostic habit: if a Related Actions menu is missing an entry a colleague can see, the cause is almost always security, not configuration. Related Actions only shows what the current user is permitted to do.

  • Search techniques
  • Predictive Search

Enter at least three characters and Workday returns type-ahead suggestions. Workday processes each term or character string separately, so two words separated by a space match objects containing both terms regardless of order or adjacency. Results are always filtered by your security permissions.

Workday's own best practices:

Keep searches simple.

Avoid general verbs such as find , edit , maintain , and create - they return more results, not fewer.

Search multiple terms to narrow results.

Exact Match

Exact Match returns the specific item first, followed by similar results. It is typically used for employee IDs, email addresses, and phone numbers. Searching employee ID 21097 returns that worker's object directly.

Search prefixes

Prefixes restrict results to one type of Workday object. Enter the prefix, a colon , then the search term.

  • Prefix Object type returned
  • org: Organization
  • sup: Supervisory organization
  • bp: Business process definition
  • loc: Location
  • field: Report field

Memorize this: typing a question mark (?) in the search box returns a report of all search prefixes. You can also reach the list from global search by selecting View Search Tips . Exam items like to ask how to discover prefixes you have not memorized.

Global Search Results and Saved Categories

The results page offers Saved Categories (Articles, People, Tasks, Reports are displayed automatically), More Categories you can promote into your saved list, and Configure Search to reorder them by drag and drop.

Synonyms

Synonyms map your organization's terminology onto Workday's. Define "zip code" as a synonym for the Workday term "postal code" and searching zip code surfaces the postal-code tasks, reports, and objects. Synonyms are maintained with the Edit Tenant Setup - Search task.

Proxy: testing what another user sees

Administrators constantly need to verify "what does an HR Partner actually see?" Proxy answers that without sharing passwords.

Configure proxy access policies in any tenant environment except Production .

Authorized users then run Start Proxy , choose a target user, and act as that user. Stop Proxy ends the session. You can start a second proxy without stopping the first.

Only unconstrained security groups can be configured with proxy access.

A user cannot start a proxy session while acting as a delegate .

You can configure only one policy per environment , although one policy can apply to multiple environments, and a policy can contain multiple rules.

Rule order matters. Workday assesses the rules in order and stops at the first applicable security group in the On Behalf Of column. Put the most restrictive rule at the top and the least restrictive at the bottom.

Proxy sessions also cannot connect to a range of other services - integrations, scheduled reports, business form printing, background conversions, email, documents on My Reports, mobile push notifications, UI notifications, Solutions, Workday Drive, and Workday Worksheets. That limitation matters when you are trying to test an end-to-end scenario and the notification never arrives.