The wildcard character (Joker) for searches

The wildcard (also called Joker) is a special character whose function is to replace any sequence of characters when searching in a text field. In all Office Maker and BiblioMaker programs, the wildcard character is the "at" : @. On a Swiss keyboard, this can be obtained by pressing AltGr 2 (Windows) or Option G (macOS).

You will only need to type the joker yourself in a few special cases, mainly in the Find action dialog, in the quick search zone or when establishing a link between two records .

Let's take an example from Business: suppose you're looking for the company record for “Smith”. If the company record exists, its exact name may be “Smith Limited”, “Smith Ltd”, “Smith Inc.” or “Smith & Sons”. To find these records, simply specify smith as your search criterion. All Address records whose Company name begins with “Smith” are found.

Office Maker Business considers each search criterion to be terminated by a wildcard. In other words, when you search for Addresses whose Company name is “Smith”, the program actually uses the “smith@” criterion.

If the characters you want to replace with the wildcard are at the beginning of a search criterion, you'll need to type them in. Using our example, if the address you're looking for is “West & Smith” or “West Smith Brompton”, you can enter @smith. This will find all addresses whose Company field contains the word “Smith”.

These examples show that you will find some information easier if you enter the data rigorously and always in the same manner.