Using Wildcards

When you search for information, you can use the wildcard character or implied wildcards to find items that contain your specified sequence of characters and that may contain additional, unspecified characters.

By default, the wildcard character is an asterisk (*), but you can change it. You would especially want to do this if you want to use the asterisk as an actual data character in fields.

You can use wildcard characters when you:

Search for values for fields.
Use filters and Filter-in-Place.
Use query forms.

Note: Not all fields support the use of the wildcard character as might be expected. This is especially true of fields that automatically expand a field to a required number of characters. This functionality is commonly seen in order and ID number fields. In these cases, you might have to place the wildcard both before and after your search characters.

The wildcard behaves slightly differently, depending on the context in which you are using it.

The wildcard character in text searches

In a text search, the wildcard represents zero or more possible missing alphanumeric characters.

For example, using the default wildcard (*), a search using A* as the search string returns all items that begin with the letter A.

Note: Text wildcard searches are not case-sensitive, so this search would return all items beginning with the letter A, for example, Anthony and automobile.

Searching for *qui* matches all items that contain the letters qui. So, items that would be returned could include Quigley and requisite.

The wildcard character in date fields

In a date search, the wildcard character matches the month, day of the month, or year.

Here are some examples:

In a system using the short date format M/d/yyyy (month/day/year):

The search term 12/*/2015 returns records for all dates in December, 2015.
The search term */*/2015 returns records for all dates in the year 2015.
The search term 12/31/* returns records for December 31 in all years.

Note: The wildcard character stands for the entire specification for a month, a day, or a year; you cannot use the wildcard in a combination such as 200* to return all years from 2000 to the current year, or in a day specification such as 2* to return all days of a month from 20 to 29.

Implied wildcards

In some fields, when you specify values on which you want to search, you can type a partial value. For example, to find any value that contains the string "test", specify test and clear the Case Sensitive check box. This locates values such as Test case, Amy's testing results, or Sales Contest. This is known as using an implied wildcard.

The sort order of the collection determines the order in which you find matching records.

Note: The Find Value and Replace Value features do not support use of the wildcard character, the "null" keyword, or comparison operators. These characters in such searches are treated as literal values. See Using the Null Keyword and Operators on Query Forms.

Changing the wildcard character

If you want to enter the asterisk as actual data in a field, you must first change the wildcard character.

See Changing the wildcard character.