Wildcard Searching
You can make searches more flexible using a wildcard. Wildcards allow you to search for all terms that begin with, end with, or include the search term you specify. The wildcard character is *. The asterisk can be thought of as a special character that means ‘replace me with none or more occurrences of any character you like’. For example, if you were interested in chlorine compounds in a chemical database, you would want to find terms such as chloride, chlorate, perchlorate and chlorination as well as chlorine itself. A suitable search term that would match with all these terms would be *chlor*. To restrict the hit list to records containing terms that begin with chlor-, use chlor*.
Another chemical example to illustrate using a wildcard at the beginning of the search term: to find references to binary compounds (whose names usually end ‑ide), search for *ide.
In larger databases you may find that some wildcard searches take a long time to run. Therefore it is possible to limit the wildcard searches that users are allowed to perform in Calm.
Please note that the most
efficient way to find every record in the database is to use the Query by Form
dialogue box, hold down the SHIFT key and press the Return key or click on the
button. You may also choose the
Find All Records option from the Search
drop down menu. This is preferable to performing a wildcard search on a single
asterisk.