Hi - I'm a journalist trying to evaluate Base in OO version 2.2 to see if I can finally have a truly useful contacts database. Running Windows XP.
I keep track of sources, people who I talk to for reporting stories. I keep the obvious information; names, phone #s, email, webpages. Also I keep fairly detailed notes on their areas of expertise and dates I've contacted them previously. I give each contact one slug (category) or more, a keyword such as "econ" in case I need to find all the possible economists in my list for a given story. I'm running into a problem searching for information and am hoping someone can help me figure out if it's really limitations built into the program, as it seems to me, or if I'm missing something. What I want to be able to do is to search both all fields or a given field (depending on what I'm looking for) for a certain word or part of that word, then pulls all the applicable records out to display . . .ideally in a list. So if I'm looking for an economist I want to look at every record that has the letters econ in any field. I prefer to look at all of the relevant records at once than try to flip through them one by one. It's just much easier to keep track of things . . also there is the possibility to save or print those pulled records should I need to refer back to that generated subgroup of my contacts over a few days. If I use the binoculars button on the form view, I can search all the fields, but only can view each record individually. When I do a query, INCLUDES is not an option for pulling records based on the search text - the closest is "like" and that doesn't cut it. (I really need to be able to search the NOTES, which is text without a set format, or the Slug/Category, which could have econ or econ politic or politic econ something else that includes econ - and again, ideally I could search all fields at once if I needed to) Filtering also wasn't flexible enough as far as I could tell. I loved FilemakerPro when I used it in the mid-90s. . but that employer supported macs! I would also note that I couldn't find any pre-selectable field named "website." I figure I can rename fields later, but that did surprise me a little bit. I would sincerely appreciate any assistance! Thanks, Emily Emily Harris Berlin Correspondent, National Public Radio home/office +49-(0)30-2809-4852 cell +49-(0)177-203-7635 www.npr.org NPR is now on the FM dial in Berlin at 104.1
