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You can search on one field or several at the same time, and you don't have to enter a complete word, number or phrase in most fields in order to search for it. Suppose you want to find all Eddie Bauer Fords. Simply enter "ford" (without the quotation marks) in the Vehicle Brand field. Enter "bauer" in the Model field. It doesn't matter whether you type these words in caps or lowercase. The application searches the entire contents of each field for the word or phrase you entered. In the example above, "bauer" is probably better than "eddie bauer". Why? Because the application looks for the exact set of characters you entered. So a record containing two spaces between "eddie" and "bauer" would not be found. If you were searching for Ford F150 pickups, entering "150" in the Model field probably would work best. That approach would find entries for both F-150 (with a hyphen) and F150 (no hyphen). If you're looking for the location from which a vehicle was towed, try entering just the street name, with no address. Except for the tow date and model year, this same "less is more" approach applies in the other search fields, as well. Narrow your search by entering information in more than one field. Suppose you want to find all Toyotas towed from Troost Avenue since Sept. 15, 2006. Enter "toyota" in the Vehicle Brand field, "9/15/06" in the From portion of the Date Towed date range, and "troost" in the Address Towed From field. To find all vehicles towed on or before Oct. 1, 2006, just enter "10/1/06" in the To portion of the Date Towed date range. To locate a vehicle by VIN number, save time by entering just a few of the digits. The search will probably return more than one vehicle, but the list should be short enough for you to find the desired vehicle easily, and you avoided some tedious typing. To see all vehicles in the database, simply click on the Search button without entering anything. In all search results, vehicles will be sorted by tow date, from the most recent backward. |