About Row Filters

The Row Filter feature is an extremely powerful component. You use row filters to narrow the data you are viewing to suit your needs. As you will see the number of uses for this feature are virtually endless.

Filter Basics

The Office Express database stores information in different pieces. For example, Last Name, First Name and Street are stored in the database in separate pieces. These pieces are called fields or columns. With a filter you can access only the information you want to view. For example, you can limit the customers you are viewing to only the customers who have a balance.

When defining a filter, put column names in brackets and surround words with single quotes. An example filter could look like this: [Last Name] = 'Jones'. When filtering by a date, surround the date with the pound sign... [Last Billed] < #1/1/2003#.

Operators

=                  Equality

<>                Non-Equality

<                   Less than

>                   Greater than

<=                 Less than or equal to

>=                 Greater than or equal to

LIKE              (see below)

IN                   Matches in a range.

Wildcard Matching

Wildcards are special characters used to match parts of a value. Use wildcards with the LIKE keyword to narrow your searches...

% - Match any occurrences of any character. For example LIKE 'SM%' would get all customers whose last name begins with SM, whereas LIKE '%SM' would locate all customers whose last name ends in SM. Note: You can use the star character (*) also in place of the percent sign. For example LIKE 'SM*'.

Boolean Operators

AND                  Both true

OR                    One or the other true

NOT                  Not true

Huh? It's not as complicated as it sounds... It's logical and you do it every day. See the following examples:

Example using OR:

[Last Name] = 'SMIITH' OR [Last Name] = 'JONES', will display both SMITH and JONES.

Example using AND:

[Last Name] LIKE 'R%' AND [Balance] > 0, will find all customers whose last name begins with R and who have an outstanding balance.

Example using IN:

[Zip] IN ( '11758', '11762, '11803' ), will narrow the view to only zip codes that are one of the three in the list.

Other Examples:

[First Name] = 'Jon'

[Price]<=50.00

[Last Billed] < #1/31/2002#"

[Balance] > 100

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