Device software for BlackBerry®

[airvonb]

I use the "Notes" field extensively in my Contacts and I've always been able to easily perform a simple text search for keywords that I place in the Notes field with all of my previous smartphones like my iPhone or Treo.  How do I search for these text keywords in my new Blackberry Bold?

[Xandrex · Accepted solution]

home screen >> search

[efaneuf]

I suspect you gave this advice without actually testing it. I have, and it does not work.

I put my street name in all the notes fields for my adjoining neighbors. When I search (using the search utility) on that string, ONLY the names from the address field come back. NONE of the notes fields entries.

Honestly, most of us appreciate advice VERY much. But at least check it once to make sure you are not misleading people. This posting will be read by many people for months and without my reply they would have thought that was a correct piece of advice.

Does anyone else, who knows about the BB Bold, have advice on how to search including the NOTE field at the bottom of the contact page?? I also use this information for a lot of general searches on my MAC so loosing this ability is a little hard to deal with.

thanks for any feedback 

[airvonb]

The solution that Xandrex sent works perfectly for me!  I'm also a Mac user with over 3500 contacts in Entourage and that "Notes" field is super important to me on my Bold.

One idea on why it might not work for you is that most of the text in my "Notes" field are unique or not duplicated in other Contact fields like "Street" or "City," etc.  Perhaps it only searches in a hierarchy that stops on "Street" field if it finds the string?  To test, I would recommend a unique string in the "Notes" field, not duplicated in another field to see if that might cause the discrepancy.

Thanks again to Xandrex for the quick response and support and thanks to efabeuf for the follow-up!

[efaneuf]

I am glad he solved your problem. I stand by my comment though. I see no reason that finding the search string in the main address fields would do anything but increase the amount of positive results. Being a software developer myself, I was amazed that this simple search tool did not work for me. 

I placed my street name in the notes field of the address entries that were not on my direct street but on perpendicular streets. In the contacts list for the phone, it found 4 addresses that were on my street that matched XYZ Drive. Putting XYZ Drive in the Notes field did not get those addresses to show up in the search. Now, if you are suggesting that I put a unique string in ALL notes I want to search on. Perhaps this would work but does muck up the works a bit. I should verify if that would work or not. I assume from your comments you did not do quite what I was suggesting. You used some unique identifier in all notes you wanted to search on. 

I supposed I could have placed a string like "My Neighbors" in the notes field and see if it picks it up. I will try that as I write this and report the results here. Re did the test again as shown below. (Putting my professional Q/A hat on here since that is one of the jobs I have held in my career)

Entered a string in the notes field of:

Test 1- 

MyNeighbors

and another one of

Test 2- (make sure it can handle space delimited test string)

The Neighbors

Test 3- (some search strings are in the address field others in the notes)

4 addresses contain XYZ Drive

2 addresses contain XYZ Drive in the notes but not in the address fields

Test 1 one finds all occurances (this one works fine) 

Test 2 works fine

Test 3 fails as I reported earlier. Spelling and case were maintained for consistency.  

This is a small but important SEARCH utility failure.  

[Xandrex]

what happens if you do the search for test 3 using only one single word with a-z characters only ?

[efaneuf]

Of course since we both have the BOLD I am sure you will have the same results as me.

Doing the test you suggest

test with just XYZ (no word drive)

Yields same results. None of the XYZ strings in the notes section are discovered only the ones from the address section.

This leads me to think that if a string is discovered in the address section it optimizes by ignoring the other fields instead of looking in all fields globally. This is about the only conclusion a person could get.

Searching for a string that is on NOTES only works fine. Searching for strings in ADDRESS SECTION only works fine.

Searching for strings that are mixed in both areas does not work.

[deichkorn]

I realize I'm replying to an old thread -- I have users that have been asking me the same question as the original poster of this thread.  There must be a way to search the data stored in the notes field of an outlook contact that is sync'd to a blackberry handheld, either via desktop manager or BES.  These users store tags in the notes field and use the tags to search and without the ability to search them on the handheld, it makes the data difficult to use.

These users previously used windows ce devices that sync'd with outlook using ms activesync.  They had the ability to easily search the notes field.  Seems odd that this functionality wouldn't be included with current mobile devices that have advanced sync'ing capabilities with microsoft outlook.

If anyone has a suggestion, I greatly appreciate the help.

[hrk]

Hii,

I have over 9000 contacts and make my way around it by searching notes and till now I am stuck with the PDA2k as I have failed miserably in the search feature with all the latest phones. Am hoping that Iphone or the droid would help me update my hardware but still no luck.

Also what would be helpful is I can define search criteria for contacts with Multiple fields and words included in my notes...

Are you working on anything as such so far?

[Johng34]

At the time of your post you were probably using ver 5.x of the OS.  The new OS 6 doesn'l allow the "Notes" field to be searched at all.  That's what I've found, as well as other people on thread # 588250 on Crackberry.

Johng34

3/12/11