This article explains search operators.

A database record is made of many little pieces of data which are stored in fields. When you search, you are looking for specific data in specific fields. In this example, we'll search for contacts living in Toronto.

His residence postal code and phone number are in two other fields.

If you need to find everyone in your database who lives in a particular city. That information is stored in the Residence City field in contact records.

To do this you must open the contacts list, choose the Search Type: Field,

then choose the field to search, in this case Residence City.

Then choose the appropriate Search Operator. "Search Operators" tell Sumac the relationship between the field you're searching in, and the value you're looking for within that field.

If you would want to find everyone who lives in Toronto, choose the Search Operator: "is equal to", then type “Toronto” into the search value field.

That tells Sumac to find contacts whose Residence City field is equal to Toronto.

Click Search and Sumac displays the results.

Each Search Operator has a particular function.

“Is equal to” searches for records in the database that match the search value that you enter. (searches are not case sensitive.)

“Not equal to” on the other hand finds all records in the database that do not match the specified search value. To find all the contacts who do not live in Toronto, change the search operator, and click Search again.

You can find records with value bigger or smaller than the value you enter. For text fields, this works alphabetically: A is considered to be less than Z.

 

“Is null” finds records in the database where the field you are searching is empty.