How it plays out on a deal
Readers in diligence rarely know where a clause lives. Searching for a counterparty name, a change of control term or a specific number across the whole room is how most of them work. File name search alone pushes them back to clicking through folders.
Two points separate good search from risky search. Results must respect permissions, so a bidder never sees a snippet from a folder they cannot open. And search should cover spreadsheets and scanned files, which is where a lot of the important content sits.
What to check in a review or demo
- 1Whether search results and previews respect folder permissions for every user group.
- 2Whether spreadsheets, emails and scanned PDFs are included in the index.
- 3Whether filters by folder, file type or date are available on the results page.
Read alongside
- Optical character recognition (OCR)Software that reads the text inside scanned documents and images, so a data room can search them like ordinary text files.
- Granular permissionsRights that the administrator can tune down to one document and one bidder group, instead of a single on or off switch for everybody in the room.
- Data room indexThe numbered table of contents of a data room, listing every folder and document with a reference number such as 3.2.4, so readers and lawyers can cite files precisely.