Hi All,
When I am using the search bar in Manager, is there a way to ignore characters. For example if I search within payments for something that I know I have paid for that the amount column would be $1,234 - I can’t seem to search for 1234. I have to search for 1,234. I can do partial search such as 234 or even 1,23 and would get the result - however is it possible to include the $1,234 when I search for 1234?
Thanks
Michael
It has always been necessary to include separator characters (comma, decimal point) to search for exact amount, so I don’t think that this will be changed.
Thanks @AJD
What would be some disadvantages to what I have suggested? Perhaps I am simple minded and too rational. I can only see it improving the UX - worst case make it a flag in the settings so the user can choose to use it.
The search has the ability to search for any text by design.
Manager’s search could be redesigned to only search for numbers but that would result in loss of the majority of it’s useful search functionality. I frequently use the search to find text like account names or parts of the description text.
My suggestion would be to ignore the characters in certain fields and I appreciate that there could be a slight speed degradation albeit negligible considering the size of my small business’ database.
It’s certainly not a show stopper.
@michaely, your suggestion is more problematic than you perhaps realize. It would make it impossible to distinguish dates from reference numbers, prices from numbers embedded within descriptions, or item codes from debits or credits. The program’s long-standing treatment of search criteria as literal strings has worked admirably for years.
@Tut, I understand what you are saying, however I don’t believe it would be problematic or impossible at all. If implemented with the right constraints it would work flawlessly.
I wrote an app that a friend used to win thousands from Div3 in lotto from his first try. However when I asked what he did, he just described autopick. He didn’t use it as intended or the way I specifically coded the app, however I didn’t enforce the user to only use it in one particular way.
You shouldn’t limit your thinking. I appreciate that the developers focus on features that would move the needle - sometimes its a good idea to improve the functionality of existing features.
There are expectations for some things in life, if I told you that 1571342 was a date you would have a hard time understanding and would expect to see the “/”, 15/7/1342, but if I told you that 1000000 was the prize you would accept that my formatting was an issue and most likely read it as one million. What I’m trying to say is that most people would know that a date requires additional characters such as “/” or “-” or even " " - I actually prefer YYYYMMDD but I’m not in the norm bucket.
Like I said it’s not a show stopper - so I’ll just leave it at that.