The software ELAN is widely used for transcription and time-alignment of linguistic and linguistic-adjacent recordings. However, it also features fairly robust search tools that are often under-utilized, but can be very useful for exploring research questions, as well as for testing and cleaning multiple files at once. This mini-workshop will cover both simple and complex ELAN searches, from simple string searches to collocations within and across tiers and annotations. It will also include a brief tutorial on regular expressions, a simple set of expressions that make possible very complex text searches.