The Lookup Menu
Lookups provide a flexible way of finding contacts by name, location, and other fields in the contact records. Whenever you create a lookup, the Contact List is filtered, displaying only the results of the lookup (the records meeting your criteria).
Many of the functions in Act! offer you the option of performing a task on all the contact records, or on the current lookup. The “current lookup” refers to the list of contacts that resulted from the most recent lookup you performed.
To perform, or create, a lookup:
- From the Lookup menu, select the command that represents the search criterion you want to use. For example, to look up contacts located in a particular state, select State.
The Lookup Contacts dialog opens.
- By default, the command you selected (such as State) is displayed in the drop-down menu under Look in this field. If you decide to search based on a different field, you can select it from this menu.
- Under Search for, the first option varies depending on the field you selected above. For example, if you selected State as the field to look in, the first option under Search for will be State.
If you change the field to look in-to Last Name, for example-the first option under Search for changes to the corresponding field. This lets you enter your specific search criteria. So if you’re searching for all contacts in the state of Louisiana, you can select LA from the drop-down menu under Search for. If you’re searching by last name, you can type in the last name.
Tip:
You don’t have to enter whole words. If you enter the first few letters, Act! will search for all records in which the content of the specified field begins with those letters. For example, if you’re searching by last name and enter “Jo”, Act! returns a list of contacts whose last names might include “Johnson”, “Jones”, and “Joseph”.
Alternatively, you can search for all records in which the specified field (depending on which one you selected, such as State) are either empty or non-empty. To do so, select the appropriate option under Search for.
When you look in the Birth Date field, the Greater than and Less than options are enabled. These options let you search for records in which the birth date meets the date criteria you enter.
- Under For the current lookup, select Include Private Contacts and Include Users to include those records in the search.
- Click OK.
The Contact List is filtered to display only the results of the lookup. You can double-click any contact record in the list to open the Contact Detail window for that contact.
- You can further filter the list (narrow the search results) using additional lookups.
To restore the complete contact list, select All Contacts from the Lookup menu.
