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Straight away you know that you are going to spend half the morning looking for the part.
For this reason, and when creating a part, it is highly recommended that you make the most of the fields that define it, including the customizable fields. Remember, you will always be asked to find something you did months ago, and for that, you will be grateful that you can take advantage of one of the most useful and powerful tools in the software - the search for items function.
In this article, I am going to tell you how to delve into Lantek’s element search function, explaining in detail how it works and how to use it to search by different criteria, such as name, code, date, status, among others, returning a list of results that can be further sorted and filtered.
From the Lantek work area, it is found in the “Start” menu in the “Editing” section, under a magnifying glass button.
If you use it a lot, it is highly recommended to assign it a short cut key, which you can configure from "Configuration Options", in the "Jobs" menu in the Jobs section.
(In a future article we will explain how to create hotkeys, for all kinds of Lantek functions, it can be really useful, saving a lot of time once created.)
When you click on the search button, an “Item Search” window opens and is also added as a tab next to “Product List”. This window has several drop-down sections which open as you click on them.
Remember, in all fields, you can use the wildcard "%" when searching for strings of text. Use it by putting a "%” before and after the text string you want to search for.
The first things that appear in the search window are the following fields:
Next, and under the "Contains" label, a new series of fields to search or filter are displayed.
Next you have a filter option "Date". Clicking on it, opens more search fields:
For the above two options, the dropdown opens two calendars, delimiting the search between the two chosen dates. If you leave this blank, Lantek will search the entire database irrespective of date.
Under the "Advanced options" menu choice, another filter dropdown opens. Here, you can search and filter by the job reference, which is code that Lantek automatically assigns to each job. This starts with "JOB..." followed by a number.
In addition to the job number and description, there are five extra user fields that you can preconfigure to label your jobs. These can be a great help in finding the job or part requested.
Lastly, there are two more options that open two dropdowns. These are "Select Budgeting Jobs" and "Select Jobs with Multiprograms". The only options are "Yes, No or Only these"; which gives a clear idea of what they do.
To use the search function in Lantek, you simply open the search window and fill in or select the criteria for all the fields and filters that you consider can refine the results.
You then click the "Search" button to execute the search.
If you have chosen the search criteria well, the list of results will be very close to what you are looking for. In addition, you can further sort and filter this list according to your needs.
To see more details of a particular result, you can right-click and a contextual menu below will appear.
From this contextual menu you can go a long way in cleaning up the search, either by deleting, opening or modifying.
As you have seen, Lantek’s search function is easy to use and will allow you to quickly find items in Lantek’s database. If you follow these steps and these tips, you will be able to obtain better results from the search function, saving time, which we always need more of!
