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Searching for Information

You can use the Search tab to search through every word in the online help. For example, if you search for the word routing, every topic that contains the word "routing" is listed.

Using the search. Select the Search tab and enter the word or phrase you want to find. You can click the Arrow button on the right to enter Boolean operators. Then click List Topics. To display one of the listed topics, either double-click it or select it and click Display. The search is limited to returning the first 500 matching topics.

Case sensitivity. The search is not case sensitive. For example, searching for Routing, routing, and ROUTING all give the same results.

Words and phrases. If you include more than one word in the search, by default, the words will be combined with the AND operator. This means that the search will return all topics that contain all of the words you have specified regardless of where they appear in the topic. If you want the search to look for the words as a phrase, enclose them in double quotation marks ("). For example, searching for single response, will return all topics that contain the two words anywhere in the topic, whereas searching for "single response" will return only topics that contain the phrase "single response".

Punctuation marks. The search ignores punctuation marks. When punctuation marks are embedded in a "word", the search considers the two parts of the word to be separate words. This means that when you search for filenames that include the filename extension (such as Museum.mdd), you need to enclose the whole filename in double quotation marks.

Highlighting the searched-for words. By default, the search highlights the words you searched for when you view the topics. To switch the highlight feature off, choose Search Highlight Off from the Options menu. (You need to run the search again to make it take effect.) To turn the feature back on, choose Search Highlight On from the Options menu.

Sorting the results. The Search tab lists the topics found using three columns—Title, Location, and Rank. By default, the topics are listed in Rank order, but you can click the headings of the columns to change the sort order. For example, if you want to sort the topics by the topic title, click the Title column heading.

Matching similar words. When this feature is selected, the search selects the grammatical variations of a word or phrase. For example, if you search for the word question, the search returns topics containing the words "questions" and "questionnaire" as well as topics containing the word "question". You turn this feature on and off by selecting or deselecting Match similar words in the lower part of the window. This feature is on by default.

Searching the results of a previous search. If the search returns a large number of topics, you may want to refine the results by restricting a new search to the results of the previous search. You do this by selecting Search previous results in the lower part of the window.

Searching topic titles only. Select Search titles only in the lower part of the window to restrict the search to the topic headings rather than the entire contents of each topic in the online help.

Operators. You can combine words using the AND, OR, NOT, and NEAR operators, as shown in the following table. Use the arrow button to the right of the search text box to insert operators into the search query. Alternatively, you can type the operators into the search text box.

Wildcards. You can use the asterisk character (*) and the question mark character (?) as wildcards in words. However, they do not work as wildcards when you use them in a phrase contained in double quotation marks.

Examples. The following table provides some examples of using the search syntax.