This section includes additional information about using the Find and Replace feature.
- You cannot update a person contact’s company name. Instead, you should associate the person to a company and update the company name on that contact.
- If you are searching for phones or addresses on people, any items shared from an associated company will not be found in the search. To update phones and addresses shared from a company, run the find and replace feature against the Firm Contacts - Companies folder.
- By default, the search done is a “contains” search. The feature will find all contacts that have the specified criteria anywhere in the selected field. For example, if you are searching the State field and you enter “la” as your criteria, the search will return contacts with “LA,” “Alabama,” “Alaska” and any other entries containing the letters “la” in the State field. To limit the results, you can choose begins with, whole word, or whole field.
- If there are multiple instances of the same string in the same field for the same record, only the first instance of the string is updated.
- Use the Search Options at the bottom of the dialog box to do the following:
- Match case - find contacts with information that uses the same capitalization as the entered criteria.
- Begins with - find contacts with information that begins with the text or numbers specified as search criteria.
- Whole word - find contacts where the specified criteria is a whole word and not part of a word. When defining whole words, InterAction does not include punctuation. Therefore, when looking for titles and suffixes, you must select the whole field option to find “Mr” (without a period). When looking for references to types of corporations such as Ltd. or Inc. to standardize punctuation, you will need to first do a search that finds all Company Names which include “Ltd” but do not include “Ltd.” From the search results, you can then run Find and Replace.
Whole field - finds contacts where the specified criteria is the only information entered in the field instead of being part of the information entered in the field.
These options are available for all fields except when you are doing an area code, domain name change, or updating all contacts in a folder. This is because none of these options are needed for performing these kinds of updates.
- You can update all contacts in a folder or view without searching for a value. For example, you can run a search that finds all contacts with MD or Esq. as a suffix and clear their titles.
- You can clear a field of any values by not entering any text in the Set to text box. Note that the Set whole field value box should be selected. Otherwise, InterAction will only clear the entered text. For example, if you search for “mr” and choose to replace it with nothing. It will clear “mr” from all fields, including “Mr.” and “Mrs.” however, it will leave “.” or “s.” behind.
- For addresses, you can specify a different field to search than the field you want to replace.
- You can search for an empty field by leaving “Find what” blank. You do not need to enter a space.
- You can specify carriage returns in an address by entering a “pipe character” before the item. For example, if you want to move all Suite information to a second line, you can specify “|Suite” in the Set to field to add it to the second line of the address.
- The Find and Replace feature does not recognize wildcard characters.