Overview:

The following general rules will help you effectively use the operators and connectors when searching in Summation Blaze.

If you want to take advantage of a field that is keyed, use the EQ (equals) operator. This operator uses the key to find the information you need. If the field is keyed, this is the fastest way of retrieving the information. You should always key fields on which you can perform an EQ search. An example of this is searching for all document summaries that pertain to a particular Overview:

ISSUE EQ DAMAGES

The CONTAINS operator conducts a word-oriented search (rather than character-based, much like that in transcripts. If you search for a word, like ART, then only the document summaries where the word ART appears are retrieved. Document summaries were the word ART is imbedded in other words, for example SMART, are NOT retrieved. When searching for phrases with the CONTAINS operator, it does not matter how much blank space occurs between the words in the phrase. For example, the search below retrieves document summaries where the Summary field contains both SECURITY COMPANY and SECURITY COMPANY. The spaces are of no consequence in the search.

SUMMARY CONTAINS "SECURITY COMPANY"

There are several comparison operators. These are often used with dates and Bates-numbers when selecting a cross-section of your documents based on a range. For example, to retrieve all the documents dated in the year 1990, the search would look like the following:

DOCDATE GE 1/1/90 AND DOCDATE LE 12/31/90

Using wildcards, you could create a shorted search phrase that retrieves the same document summaries:

DOCDATE EQ */*/90

To retrieve summaries where the specified field contains data (i.e. is not blank), use the operator EXISTS. To determine that a field does not contain any information, use the operator FAILS. For example, to locate all documents that have an issue code in the Issue field:

ISSUE EXISTS

Table of Operators