Some of us suffer from a very selective memory. For example, you might not remember a contact's name or even the name of his company, yet you remember a seemingly inconsequential detail such as the fact that his kids play soccer.
The ability to perform a simple lookup based on a single field criterion is an element common to most databases; after all, all databases contain fields. ACT!, however, provides you with the ability to create a search on keywords. These searches scour not only your field content but also search through your Activities, Opportunities, Histories, Notes, and Relationships looking for a match. In the above example, you could type in "soccer" and ACT! would come up with a list of contacts, all of which include soccer somewhere in their record.
- From the Contacts Detail or List views click the Lookup menu and point to Advanced and select Search on Keywords
- Enter the key piece of information that you're searching for in the Search for area of the Search on Keywords dialog window. You can see an example in the following screenshot:
- In the Type drop-down list, indicate whether you're looking for Contact, Group, Company, or Opportunity records.
- Select all options that apply in the Look in area.
- Click the Find Now button. The results of your search will appear in the bottom of the Search on Keywords dialog window.
- (Optional) Scroll through the items to find the record you were looking for.
- Double-click the selected record to go to that contact record.
- Double-click the Keyword Search tab that now appears in the bottom-left corner of the Contact Detail window to return to your search.
- Click Close when you are finished with the search.
ACT! responds with a list of contact records when you create a keyword search. A contact can be listed several times if the keyword appears in several places on their record. The lookup results show the contact's name, the field and record type in which ACT! finds the matching data, and the data itself.
The keyword search is a very comprehensive searching tool, and it takes a bit longer to run than other searching methods. To speed up the process, you can limit the amount of elements to search. For example, you can limit your search to just Activities and Histories.
If you use an ACT! E-Marketing account, you've probably already noticed that a history item is created when you update the results in ACT!. These history entries contain information about whether a recipient opted out or ignored your email, or if their email address is invalid or bounces. ACT!'s Marketing Results tab allows you to search for these results by copying various coded information into the clipboard. At that point, you can paste the information into the Search for box of the Search as Keywords dialog window to find the results of your email.
There are several searches that an administrator of a large database may find extremely useful. These searches all pertain to databases that have multiple users and are particularly valuable if your organization limits the number of contacts that can be viewed on a user by user basis. All of these searches are accessible by going to the Lookup menu and choosing Advanced.
- Users: Creates a lookup of all the users of your database.
- Contact by Access: Creates a lookup of the contacts that can be viewed by each of your database users if you are using limited contact access. As you can see in the following screenshot, there are a number of ways to run this lookup. You might want to find all the Public records, or see which of the records managed by one user are accessible to another.
- Last Synchronized: Creates a listing of all contacts that have changed during the specified date range, including the name of the user who made the change and the changes they made.
- Sync Set: Lists the names of the contacts that are included in a sync set.