Understanding Databases – Retrieving Information

Use the search command to find specific data in a field

This tutorial demonstrates how to find specific records within a table.

This won’t cover forms or reports, which can do the same thing but display the data in a different (more user-friendly) format.

4-1 Search Record

Sometimes you may want to just quickly check data within a table rather than go to the lengths of creating forms or reports.

This most commonly happens when you are populating the table for the first time, to check on certain data. Or it could occur when you are searching data that isn’t looked at or used very often, so the benefits of setting up a form or report aren’t worth the extra effort.

Click the search icon to open a Record Search window.

Type the data to find, or select ‘Field content is NULL’ to find blank fields, or ‘not NULL’ for non-blank fields.

Select ‘All fields’ or choose a ‘Single field’ to search within.

If you want to match the exact case of that data (e.g. male, but not female), then select ‘Match Case’ from Settings and click search.

The first match will be highlighted in red in the table and the record will be stated in the Record Search window.

If you click ‘Search’ again, it will show the next match and so on, cycling through the matches.

Apply a filter to a table

4-2 Apply Filter

To set a filter, click the ‘Standard Filter’ icon, opening a new window. Choose the Field you want to filter by (e.g. Start Date). Choose a condition (e.g. greater than or equal to >= ), and enter a value. Click OK to filter the records to show only the results that match this filter (e.g. Start Dates later than 01/02/2013)

Remove an applied filter from a table

4-3 Remove Filter

To remove the filter, click the ‘Reset Filter’ icon, this restores the view that shows all of the records.