Whether your solution tracks students, invoices, meetings, or schedules, at some point you or your co-workers will need to find records that fall within a date or time range. You may want to know how many students were enrolled in your school during October. You may want to find out how many 8:00 am meetings were scheduled in your conference room this week. Or you may want to quickly find the total number of invoices you generated during the second quarter.
For years FileMaker Pro has included the range symbol (…) in Find mode, which let users search for date, time, or other ranges. All you had to do was enter Find mode and type three dots between a value that represented the beginning of the range and a value that represented the end of the range in an appropriate field. After clicking on the Find button, all records with values in that field that fell within the range, including the starting and ending values, were returned to a found set. This was easy enough, but if you had to search for date or time ranges hundreds of times a day, even this technique became cumbersome.
One of the most overlooked but powerful features recently added to FileMaker Pro's user toolkit is a set of shortcut options for finding time and date ranges. You can now find ranges of times and dates by entering Find mode, typing as little as a single character in a field, and performing the Find. FileMaker Pro now makes searching for time and date ranges easy and fast. By learning a few simple rules, you'll immediately begin saving time and mouse clicks.
Date searches
Finding records that have values in a date field for a particular year has never been easier. In Find mode, simply enter the four-digit year in the appropriate date field to find all records that have a date value within that year. For example, if you enter Find mode and type "2006" in a date field and perform the find, FileMaker Pro returns all records with a 2006 date in that field.
How does FileMaker Pro know what you're looking for? It automatically adds the * symbol for the day and month when a recognized year value is the only value entered. In the example I just described, FileMaker Pro is actually searching for */*/2006. The * symbol will return any characters in the day and month portion of the date, therefore any date in 2006. Four-digit year values between 0001 and 4000 are recognized as valid.
FileMaker Pro makes similar assumptions when performing a Find for a particular month. By simply entering a single number value between 1 and 12 into a date field in Find mode, FileMaker Pro assumes the value represents a month and returns all records that have dates within that month. For example, if the current year (according to your operating system's clock) is 2008, performing a Find by simply entering a "3" in a date field returns all records that contain a March 2008 date in that field.
FileMaker Pro automatically adds the current year and the * symbol for the day portion of the date. In the example above FileMaker Pro is actually searching for 3/*/2008.