Hello, Spelling! It's been such a long time since August 2018 when you asked in the Forum for an explanation of
the difference between "Come here" and "Come to me." I trust that everything's well with you in New Zealand.
Now regarding your latest grammar puzzler:
If at the start of the weekend you ask someone "to have a look at some documents" over the weekend, the typical idiomatic way to ask that person on Monday morning is to use the present-perfect interrogative "
Have you had a look at the documents?" and not the past-perfect interrogative "
Did you have a look at the documents?"
The important thing to remember is that "have a look" is an idiomatic verb phrase where "have" isn't an auxiliary verb or helping verb but a transitive main verb in the sense of "obtain," and the word "look" in that idiomatic phrase isn't a verb but a noun--in the sense of "glance" or, more to the point, "examine" or "study." More precisely, this gives "have a look at the documents" the figurative sense of "take the time or trouble to (examine, read through, go over) the documents."
In this particular instance that you are using the idiomatic phrase, the present-perfect form "have had a look" is the correct tense to use because the interrogative sentence regarding the action covers the entire period from the start of the weekend to the very point that you are asking the question. The past-perfect tense interrogative form "
Did you have a look at the documents" will correctly apply only if you have provided a specific past time in your question for the action, as in, say, "Did you have a look at the documents (last Saturday, last Sunday, yesterday, last night)."
This is admittedly a long and complicated explanation but I can assure you that it's the simplest I can give for this particularly tough grammar puzzler you have posed--the toughest that have been asked in the Forum for quite a long time now.
Keep safe from Covid-19 in New Zealand or wherever you might be residing or living now since I last heard from you!
