database keyword search

[SomeoneNamedMichael]

Hi all,

I’m not so great with all this, so let me apologize beforehand if this topic is in the wrong area.

So we have this program that works off our SQL 2008 standard database. The company we bought it from is pretty unhelpful when it comes to tech stuff, so I haven’t been able to get many answers from them.

The problem we are facing is a basically a searching problem.

In their program, which is a contact database, there is a query tool to search for particular keywords in particular fields, so I could search words like “kyle” in the contacts name field, and it would return people whose contact name begins with “kyle”.

The problem is that their search function only searches the columns for the first word word of the string, so the data field would have to begin with “kyle” for it to return results. If there was a contact whose name was “david kyle jr.” the search would never return that value as his name doesn’t start with “kyle”.

This problem holds true when searching the contacts notes field, which becomes totally useless as notes entered on a contact could contain a particular word anywhere within the text entered.

So my question is, is there a way to program excel/access/whatever to connect to a SQL database, look only in the table named contacts, and search the column “notes” for any reference to a keyword that the user types, and then return all those contacts and their details? Or does a search like this have to be done in SQL and exported to a spreadsheet?

Any advice for this would be awesome, thank you.

[alansidman]

If you are able to use Access as a front end to search the tables in your data base, you could build a query and in the criteria for whatever fields you wish to return data, you could put a Like statement with a wildcard.

An example would be in LastName field. In the criteria, type LIKE *Smith* and the results would return all records in that field having Smith as any part, ie. Smithfield, Blacksmith, Smith, etc.

Alan