Searching For Idea Records

The easiest way to find any Idea record is to open the Ideas Index Window by clicking on the Ideas Index hyperlink found at the top of almost every window in the software.

Then enter one or more keywords into the Search Panel at the bottom, center, of the window and click the Search hyperlink.

The window will display any Idea records that contain the keywords your searched for.

Where those keywords were found in each record will be highlighted in light purple.

Ideas Index Window displaying matching records.

Using Multiple, Consecutive, Keyword Searches To Locate Records

Each time you run a keyword search, the new search, searches the set of records currently displaying in the "Index" window.

By running consecutive searches, where each search uses a different set of keywords, you can narrow down the set of matching records being displayed, until it's easy to find the record you're looking for with just a visual scan.

For example, the search above is looking for records that were created on a Monday, in June, of any year. The search found 10 records out of the 246 records that were searched.

Now if we wanted to know which of these records were created in 2020, during the AM hours, we could run two more consecutive searches, on the records above to find them. Here's one way of doing these searches.

Start by erasing the 'monday, june' keywords in the Search field, and replace them with a blank space and then the letters 'am'.

Then click the Search hyperlink. This new search finds 7 matching records, from the 10 records that were searched.

Ideas Index Window displaying matching records for 2020 search.

Now to find which of these were created in 2020, we clear the ' am' keywords and replace them with '2020', and then click the Search hyperlink again. Now we have 1 matching records out of the 7 that were searched.

Ideas Index Window displaying matching records for AM search.

The important thing to remember about regular searches, and especially consecutive searches, is that they're always searching just the set of records being displayed by the window.

Click the Reset hyperlink, or the All Ideas hyperlink, to display all the Idea records in the
Ideas Database.

The only time they'll search all of the Idea records in the Ideas database, is if you start the search by clicking on the Reset hyperlink (or the All Ideas hyperlink, in the Sort Ideas section of the hyperlinks list) first. Doing that, loads all the Idea records in the database into the window.

Opening An Idea Record In Its Editing Window

Once you find the record you're looking for, if you want to open it in it's editing window so you can make changes to its fields, all you have to do is double click anywhere on that record's entry in the list.

For example, to open the first record in the last search we did, just double click anywhere on that record's entry.

Double click anywhere on a record entry to have its record opened in the Idea window,
the record's editing window.

The record is displayed in the Ideas Window, it's editing window.

The Idea record is displaying in the Idea Window now.

Using An Advanced Search To Find Records

So far in this help page, we've been doing regular keyword searches, where you enter one or more keywords into the Search field and click the Search hyperlink.

This type of search treats the keywords as a single block of text ('monday, june'), that it searches for in all of a record's fields. The only search criteria the search uses is that the field contains the entire block, somewhere inside of it.

However, there will be lots of times when you need to search one or more specific fields, in simple, or complicated ways, and using a series of consecutive, regular searches will simply be to time consuming, or not even possible. When you need this type of search, you should click on the Advanced Search hyperlink in the Search panel.

You'll see an Advanced Search Settings dialog box pop up, and you can use it to select the fields you want searched, and then configure the rules for what's to be searched in that field, how comparisons are made, and how many of the keywords have to be found in each searched field.

The Advanced Search dialog box is displayed.

In this image the dialog box is configuring a search on the Creation Date field of a Idea record.

This search is doing the same type of search that we used the set of consecutive, regular searches above, to do.

But this time, it's only the Creation Date field, not all the fields in the record that are being searched.

Also, we get to use, in one place, all the keywords we used in the consecutive regular searches above.

The Advanced Search dialog box is configuring a search on the Creation Date field of a Idea record.

After the Search hyperlink in the dialog box is clicked on, only 1 record, out of the 246 that were searched, started on a Monday in June of 2020, during the AM hours.

For more details about how to do Advanced Searches on Idea records, click here.