Filter Criteria: General Rules and Tips

Filter Criteria Overview | Filter Lists | Modify Report Options

Using Spaces: A space made by pressing <Space> is a criteria character (the same as any other entered character). When a space is included in a value, a matching space is required in the data record for the record to be a match during filtering.

Upper/Lower-Case: Point of Sale does not distinguish between upper- and lower-case letters when filtering. Navy, navy, and NAVY would all return the same matches.

Blank Fields: A blank field acts as a wildcard; it matches every entry. No matter what is contained in that field in each record, the record is included during filtering. If all filter values are blank, all data records are included in the filter results.

Blank Entries: To filter for descriptive fields with blank entries, use empty quotes as your filter value.

Example: Entering "" as your size value would locate records that have no value recorded in their Size field.

Exact Matches: Enclose the criterion in quotation marks to require an exact match, i.e. to require the characters enclosed by the quotation marks to match the entire field entry, character for character. A matching data field cannot contain any characters (even leading spaces) that are not also in your criterion.

Example: If your criterion is Blue, both BLUE and SKY BLUE are matches. To find only exact matches for BLUE, i.e. include BLUE but exclude SKY BLUE, use "Blue" as your criterion. Since the entire field entry must match what is contained within the quotation marks, only Blue is a match.

Including/Excluding Matches: Select Include (default) or Exclude to the right of a criteria field to either include or exclude matching records in the output, respectively.

Example: If you want to filter for all vendors except one, you could select that vendor as the criteria and toggle the Include/Exclude option to Exclude. All vendors except the one specified will be included in the filtered results.

You can also exclude matches by using the tilde (~ ) character. Think of the tilde as meaning not or exclude. To exclude all blank records, enter a tilde and empty quotes (~"").

Examples:

- ~Blue (not blue): Excludes any records that include the word blue anywhere in the specified field. Example: Field entries of BLUE, SKY BLUE, DARK BLUE, and BLUE GREEN would cause their respective records to be excluded from the results.

- ~"Blue" (not an exact match to what is in the quotation marks, i.e. not exactly/only blue): Example: A field entry of BLUE would cause its respective record to be excluded. Records with field entries of SKY BLUE, DARK BLUE, and BLUE GREEN would be included in the results.

Related Topics

Entering data