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Using Search

Search Options

Where to search:
Here you can specify which Projects you would like to search. The choices are as follows:

What to search:
Here you can specify whether to search both the title and contents of a Document, or just the title (the former is MUCH quicker, but is less accurate). The choices are as follows:
  • "Titles and Text" - Searches both the title and the contents of each Document. Since this requires opening each Document in turn it is slower than searching through the titles only
  • "Titles only" - Just searches through the Document titles
Enter Keywords:
This is where you can enter the keywords you wish to search for. For more details on this see Entering Keywords below.

Case Sensitive:
Select this if the search is to be case sensitive. That is, if upper and lower-case values matter - eg. "Colour" will return a different result than "colour" if this option is selected.

Find/Cancel Buttons:
After selecting all your search options and entering the relevant keywords, you can either click "Find" to perform the search, or "Cancel" to quit the search dialog box.

Entering Keywords

There are a few simple rules when it comes to entering keywords for a search.

  1. Any words you want to appear in a Document must be typed in with spaces separating them
  2. Any words that MUST appear in a Document should be proceeded by a plus symbol, eg. "+digital". It doesn't matter if there is a space between the plus sign and the keyword or not
  3. Any words that must NOT appear in a Document should be proceeded by a minus symbol, eg. "-digital". Yet again it doesn't matter if there is a space between the minus sign and the keyword or not
  4. If you are searching for a particular phrase (or a word which contains text other than an upper or lower case letter or a number), you must enclose the string in inverted commas, eg. "the first ever broadcast" will make the search look for the exact phrase "the first ever broadcast". If you want to exclude a phrase, simply add a minus sign before the first inverted comma, eg. -"the first ever broadcast"
  5. If your search is case sensitive, you should type your keywords using the desired case. Hence typing "colour" and "Colour" will return different results
  6. The amount of whitespace between keywords is irrelevant
  7. Specifying keywords to be excluded will generally make the search faster
  8. Excluded keywords take precedence over keywords which must appear, which in turn take precedence over normal keywords
For example, if a search was performed using the options in the screenshot above, the program would look in the current Project for the word "television" but it will only return a Document that DOES NOT contain the word "digital". Hence the user would probably be looking for an article on analogue television sets. Both the Document titles and content would be searched, and the case is not important.

Performing a Previous Search

To quickly perform a previous search, you can select the keywords from the drop-down list on the Search form. This saves you having to repeatedly type in the Search string on different occasions.