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There are multiple ways to perform the advanced search in Colleague in case you want to filter out some results from a large search.
Let’s look at those ways one by one:
Advanced Person Search
In the Search Area, click on the “Advanced” button, which is located at the far right.
Once you click on the “Advanced” button, you’ll see the following form with many search fields to filter from.
Soundex Search
Soundex Search = ‘sound like’ search
Soundex Search is really helpful when you want to search person by their nickname. For e.g. if you don’t know if you’re searching for Jon, John, or, Jonathan, you can use Soundex Search to find it.
You can perform a Soundex Search by using the ‘/’ character.
If you search for “/ jon“, Colleague will show results for Jon, Jonathan, John, Johnathan, and even Juan.
Keep in mind that Soundex search takes a bit additional time to return the results and sometimes it’ll return many results depending on your database.
Alternate Field Search
In Colleague ‘Birth Date’ is not a searchable field when you use the Advanced Person Search form but there is a way to search a person’s record just using a birth date.
To search a person’s record just using a birth date, you need to have the database field name first.
The birth date in Colleague is stored in the ‘BIRTH.DATE’ field in the PERSON table.
To search Colleague for a person with a birth date “12/07/1941′, you need to add a semicolon as a prefix:
;birth.date = ‘12/07/1941’
It works for a 2-digit or 4-digit year.
Combination Field Search
I’d like to call it a quick advanced search.
If you have a few different fields about a person, you could combine those fields into one and create a combined search. This will help you narrow down the search results.
To create a combined search, you need to add a semicolon as a prefix to each search term and separate each search term with a space.
Just like this:
;birth.date = '01/01/70' ;last.name = 'Ellucian'
A Soundex Search can be combined with an Alternate Field Search like this:
;birth.date = '01/01/70' ;/ Ellucian
Credit: Colleague User Manual
advanced database date Ellucian examples search
