Search Bug?

J

Jeff Zienowicz

This looks like a bug in the way searches are processed: An Advanced Find
for All Items where the Title contains "California" will find everything as
expected except contacts whose company name contains "California."

If I add an additional criterion line, repeating exactly the first one (i.e.
Title contains "California") with the match set to "if any criteria are
met," Entourage finds everything as expected, including contacts with
"California" in the company name. That's with two identical criteria lines
specified!

Is this a documented bug? Oh, and I suppose others have already noticed
that while editing messages, Opt-Delete doesn't delete a word as it does in
other Mac applications.

Thanks,
Jeff
 
P

Paul Berkowitz

This looks like a bug in the way searches are processed: An Advanced Find
for All Items where the Title contains "California" will find everything as
expected except contacts whose company name contains "California."

If I add an additional criterion line, repeating exactly the first one (i.e.
Title contains "California") with the match set to "if any criteria are
met," Entourage finds everything as expected, including contacts with
"California" in the company name. That's with two identical criteria lines
specified!

Is this a documented bug? Oh, and I suppose others have already noticed
that while editing messages, Opt-Delete doesn't delete a word as it does in
other Mac applications.
Click to expand...

Why would you call that a bug? In Entourage (as opposed to, say, Apple's
Address Book), the "Company" field does not constitute a "Title" - which for
contacts is just the Name (i.e. First Name & Last Name fields). So, yes, you
would have to add a separate criterion for Company, as you did. This is
working as expected, not a bug. They are not identical criteria lines.
What's a little confusing is that, in Entourage 2004, not X, the Address
Book itself does display the Company in the Name column of there's no name.
(Nickname, if it exists. Or the email address, if there's no company. Or
instant Message, if none of the above.) It even uses the "large print" in
the summary for the Company if no name. So I'd agree with you that this
should be made consistent across the app so as not to be confusing.
Nevertheless, at the moment, it doesn't check Company field (and would be
slower if it had to check it only when there's no Name) for Title.

I just checked TextEdit - the default Mac text application. It doesn't
delete a word when you press option-delete either - it just deletes one
character as usual. I haven't ever known about it in (some other?) Mac apps
myself.


--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

Please "Reply To Newsgroup" to reply to this message. Emails will be
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PLEASE always state which version of Microsoft Office you are using -
**2004**, X or 2001. It's often impossible to answer your questions
otherwise.
 
J

Jeff Zienowicz

Thanks for your reply. I see your point with regard to the Company field
issue. It just seemed intuitive to me that if I were to search across all
Entourage items for a particular word (I guess I was thinking of it like a
Spotlight search), I'd want to see potentially related contacts, with the
company name seeming the most obvious analog to the Title field (as in Note
title, Event title, etc.). The second criterion line I added was identical
to the first -- "Title contains California" -- so it seemed inconsistent to
me that Title would search in the contacts Company field, but only if it's
specified a second time.

Of course, Saved Searches makes this moot, as I can set it up the way I want
it to work and easily re-use it.

Option-delete does delete one word to the left on my Mac, and
Option-fwd-delete deletes one word to the right -- in TextEdit and virtually
every other app except Entourage (regardless of the preference setting about
using Office keyboard shortcuts). I'm on Tiger now, but I'm fairly certain
it worked that way in Panther (those are two of my most often-used keyboard
shortcuts). Even Dreamweaver, which is a terrible Mac application from a
keyboard shortcut point of view, supports it. You have to have the
insertion point right at the end of the word, not after the space that may
be after the word you're deleting.

Thanks for being active in this newgroup. As the pre-eminent Entourage
scripter, your knowledge of the product is very valuable to the group (btw,
is there any good documentation of Entourage's AppleScript implementation?
I need to write some scripts to sync with some FileMaker databases).

- Jeff
 
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