Using wildcards in searches.
Because of variations in spelling of names finding the entry you want is not simply a matter of typing in the name you are looking for. The following two examples illustrate this.
We are going to look for the baptism of Margareta Terzza, daughter of Antony and Mary Terzza, around 1851. (This was a real lookup, requested on the NottsGEN mailing list)
If we enter 'Margareta' in the CNAME column, and 'Terzza' in the FSURN column,
then press the datasheet button
We are disappointed to see no baptism is found:
Are there any Terzza baptisms we wonder?
Click on Design View
and delete
'Margareta' from the CNAME column.
Click on Datasheet view again
We can now see that there are a number of Terzza entries:
There are several entries for Anthony and Mary in the 1850s.
We still do not have our Margareta however. Could there be other entries?
Click
to return to the design view.
Amend the FSURN entry to cover other possible spellings. This can be
a case of trial and error.
I tried t*zz* where the * represents any string of characters.
Note that when you put wildcards into the search criteria, MS Access automatically
puts quotes
around the text and puts the word LIKE in front of it.
This is produced:
And now we see Margareta! Only she is Margaretta Terzzey - not Margareta
Terzza - baptized 10 April 1854.
Note that for this family we have 5 different spellings of the surname - Terzza,
Tirzza, Tezza, Terzzey, and Terzzay.
See the next example for a similar problem with Forenames.