FAQ: Searching your database

How can I search for specific items in my data?

There are a number of ways to find that one item you are looking for.

The quick search box

The quickest way is to enter a piece of text into the quick search box in the toolbar. This is the box in the toolbar to the left of the funnel icon(s).

Enter for example "Elvis" to find all albums of Elvis Presley, but of course all Elvis Costello albums will also show up.

Incremental search
You can also use the 'incremental search' function. This sounds difficult, but really it's not. How does it work?

First, in the list click on a column header. As you know, your collection will now be sorted by that field.

Now you just start typing. Start typing the text you are looking for.

An example : you want to browse to the Madonna album "Hard Candy" in Music Collector. First, you click the header called "title". Your albums are now sorted on "album title".

Now you type : "hard can..". You will see that even before you have typed the complete title has Music Collector found and highlighted the album. This is called the incremental search function.

You can reset this way of searching just by stopping to type. After about a second the search will be reset. After that, you can type and the search will start from the top again.