Get me a copy of that letter we sent to Jones about the car insurance. Now A fairly typical demand in any office.
“”Some months ago I wrote an article about buses using ethanol. Can you dig it out for me? I need it yesterday.”
A fairly typical inquiry of a newspaper library.
Now scurrying through paper files is at and end. Instead full-text electronic searching is here with a program called ISYS. Another document-finding program, Sherlock, has also come on to the market. Sherlock is not very good, but it is cheap. ISYS is stunning. So is its price.
I have always been sceptical of full-text searching. The Word for Windows text-search program is slow and infexible. It finds the documents containing the words (slowly), but will not easily call up the documents and hone in on the searched text. Often I abandoned the electronic search and reached for the clippings file. No more.
ISYS lets you create a database according to file type (text, word, spreadsheet or whatever) and/or nominated directories and/or sub-directories. Sorry about all the “”and/or”s, but the program is that flexible.
I have about 325,000 words written over the past year for The Canberra Times. It took eight seconds to retrieve the 70 documents containing y and search within it.
It will allow secondary searches. So if you look for “”Keating” and get 50 documents, you can search within those 50 for, say, “”trees”, but if that results in zero documents, you can