Instructions for Searching

Fill in one or more fields with words or abbreviations of words. The order of the words is ignored. For example rain sun matches rain or sun and sunny with rainbows but not sun (because there is no rain).

A blank field matches everything; leave all fields blank to match all records.

To match a phrase, enclose it in double quotes, for example: "ice cream" matches ice cream cones and ice creams but not cream and ice.

The following special characters may also be used:

  1. @ matches one arbitrary character; for example @rain matches train but not rain or strain
  2. * matches zero or more arbitrary characters; for example *bow matches bow and rainbow
  3. = forces the words to be an exact match; for example =sun =rain matches rain and sun but not sunny with rainbows
  4. < and > works in both numeric and date fields. For example, to search after a date, you would enter >7/10/96 or on a certain date, =7/11/96. To search a range of dates, for example for a single month, enter: greater than symbol5/30/96 less than symbol7/1/96 with only a space between the dates.
  5. // in a date field means "today"
  6. ? in a date field finds invalid dates or times
  7. ! finds all records that contain duplicate entries in that field
To find text containing special characters, enclose the text in double quotes. For example use "aname@anaddress" to find the email address aname@anaddress.