Use ‘View companies’ to search for, and if necessary change the details of the companies stored. Alternatively, click the [View companies] button in the Functions Palette.
On selecting ‘View companies’ you are presented with a box asking for the ‘Company, Postcode, Tel or Surname to find:’.
If you want to see a list of all the companies on your database, click [Find] without typing anything. This dialogue box will search on the following fields (listed in order of search): company code, company name/Also Known As/Company Abbrev, Postcode, Telephone number and Surname/Forename of contact.
If you are searching solely for a specific company by name, it will be quickest to type in part on its name, or the surname of one of its contacts and then to press [Find]. The company Abbrev field is an abbreviated, stripped version of the company name, created automatically by Enterprise 6. It is only 21 characters long, and contains no spaces, punctuation marks or other non-alpha-numeric characters.
The word ‘The’ followed by a space will be removed if it appears at the beginning of a name, and ‘Limited’, ‘Ltd’, 'LLP' and ‘plc’ will be removed from anywhere as long as they are preceded by a space. Your search string is abbreviated in the same way.
So, for example, in order to find a company in the database with a company name of ‘A.C.I. UK limited’, you could type “A.C.I. UK Ltd”, “ACI UK”, “ACIUK”, “The ACI UK” or even “--A*&^C]\I U!K” !
The foregoing is applicable when using the Quick Search dialogue of this function (‘View companies’), when entering a company code on any other screen to link that screen to a company, and when entering text to the initial deduplication window when entering new companies.
If, though, you want to find, for example, all Clients in London, or any other more complex requirement, simply press [More Choices] here without entering anything. You will be presented with a window requesting the full selection Criteria by which you wish to find companies.
These Criteria match the information that was entered to the companies file: It is best explained by example:
- To select all Client companies in London, enter “London” to the Town and “C” (assuming this is your code for clients) to the Status
- To select all Designers allocated to you last week, enter “DES” (or your code for Designers) to the type, your initials to Sales and start and end dates of the last week to the Entry date.
- To select all companies that have received a Brochure in the last month, select diary Items from the Find menu, enter the diary selection criteria (your Action code for sending brochures and appropriate Done dates - see View diary for more details of this window) then click [Find] to return to the company selection window and [Find] again.
- There are of course endless possibilities. Simply clicking [Find] without entering any criteria will select all the companies in the database.
Once the selection has been made, one of two things will happen:
- If a single company was found, and the View Always shows Lists check box in Preferences is switched off, that company’s details will be displayed in full. See ‘Enter companies’ above for details of this screen. Pressing [√] will confirm any modifications you make. When first viewing a company record, there is initially no cursor highlight or insertion point. This is to help prevent the accidental overtyping of existing data. In order to highlight a field, either click or use the <Tab> key.
- If more than one company was found by the Criteria entered, or a single company was found and the View Always shows Lists check box in Preferences is switched on, those found will be displayed as a list. You may scroll forwards or backwards through this list using the vertical scroll bar, and to the left and right using the horizontal scroll bar. On the Buttons Palette are a series of options: [Sort], [Report], [Graph], [Sets], [Apply], [New], [Select], [Search], [Delete] and [√]. These are described in more detail in the Core Functions reference chapter. If you double-click on a selection of companies, you will be taken to the full screen for the first chosen, then the [Next Record] button will progress you to the next.