Your first query

Open a collection, filter it with the query bar, sort, page through the results and count them.

Every collection opens in a Collection Tab: a query bar at the top and the matching documents below. Queries only read data; nothing you type in the query bar can change a document.

This example finds the garden products of the fictional acme_store database that have more than 20 items in stock.

The products collection filtered on the Garden category with more than 20 items in stock

Steps

In the Open connections tree, expand your connection, then the acme_store database, then Collections.
Double-click products (or select it and press Enter). A tab opens with the first 50 documents in Table View.

Click in the Query field and type:

{ category: "Garden", stock: { $gt: 20 } }

Press Enter (or F5), or click Run. The table now shows only the matching documents.
To sort by price, most expensive first, type { price: -1 } in Sort and press Enter.
To show only some fields, type { name: 1, price: 1, stock: 1 } in Projection.
Click Count Documents in the status bar of the tab to get the exact number of matches.

Reference: the query bar

Field	What it holds	Example
Query	The filter: which documents to return	`{ "address.city": "Springfield" }`
Projection	Which fields to return (`1` include, `0` exclude)	`{ name: 1, email: 1 }`
Sort	The order (`1` ascending, `-1` descending)	`{ orderedAt: -1 }`
Skip	How many documents to skip first	`100`
Limit	The maximum number of documents (`0` or empty: no limit)	`500`

The fields accept the MongoDB shell syntax: unquoted field names, single-quoted strings, comments, and type helpers such as ObjectId("…"), ISODate("…"), NumberDecimal("…") and regular expressions like /^gar/i. An empty field is simply not used.

Button	What it does
Run ▾	Runs the query. The arrow also offers findOne(…) and count(…).
Load query, Save query	Reuse queries you saved; see Query history and saved queries
Query history	The queries you ran recently
Set default query ▾	Makes the current query the one this collection opens with
Open query in ▾	Continues the query in another tool
Visual Query Builder	Builds the query with drag and drop (Ctrl+B); see Visual Query Builder
Result, Query Code, Explain	Sub-tabs: the documents, the query as code for your application (Ctrl+G), and how the server runs it

Under the query bar, the result toolbar has Refresh (Ctrl+R), first, previous, next and last page buttons, the page size (50 by default), the range shown (“Documents 1 to 50”), and the view selector (Table View, Tree View, JSON View). See Paging and Table, Tree and JSON views.

Tips

Paste a whole shell statement such as db.products.find({ category: "Garden" }).sort({ price: -1 }).limit(10) into the query bar: the app splits it into the Query, Sort and Limit fields.
Type an _id value alone in Query and press Enter to look up that one document.
Press Ctrl+Space in a field to see completions for field names and operators.
Next and previous pages (Ctrl+Alt+Right / Left) reuse the query you last ran, not text you typed since.
Long queries run in the background: the elapsed time shows in the tab’s status bar, and the rest of the window stays usable.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause and fix
A field is underlined in red and nothing runs	The text cannot be read. Hover the field to see the reason, with the line and column.
“Skip must be a whole number, 0 or more”	Skip and Limit take plain numbers.
The server returns an error (unknown operator, bad regular expression)	The message comes from the server; the fields stay as you typed them so you can fix them.
No documents, but you expected some	Check the field names and value types: `"20"` (a string) does not match `20` (a number).

Next: Keyboard basics.

Steps

Reference: the query bar

Reference: the Collection Tab toolbar

Tips

Troubleshooting