Wildcards Add Flexibility to Lookups

PowerShift lookups have long been an essential tool for finding orders, items, customers, vendors and so forth. With the introduction of wildcard support in PowerShift 4.10, lookups are even more powerful.

In 4.10 lookups, Search for replaces Starts with and Contains. While the 4.00 lookup searches worked well for finding exact matches, Search for adds flexibility by enabling wildcard characters to increase or decrease the number of matching records returned.

* (asterisk) is probably the most widely used wildcard character, taking the place of zero or more characters. For example, if you enter:

*NUT*, you’ll see the same matches that you saw when you used Contains; i.e., all records include "nut" (regardless of case)

But what if you only want to see records that start or end with "NUT"?

Entering *NUT finds strings that end with "nut", "Nut", "NUT", etc.
Entering NUT* finds strings that start with "nut", "Nut", "NUT", etc.

Other wildcard characters:

? replaces a single character (e.g., entering 30? finds 30M, 30%, etc.)
# replaces a single digit (0-9) (e.g., entering ##ml finds 10ml, 20ml, etc.)

Wildcard characters are described in greater detail here; from within PowerShift 4.10, enter ?WILD at any menu. If you have any questions, contact the Qantel Helpdesk or call us at 630.300.6999 for more information.