PracticeMaster Q&A: Document Search Options

June 2019    Tags: Document Management, PracticeMaster, Search

I use the Document Search function in PracticeMaster to look for desired content within our saved documents. But I don’t always find what I want, due to misspellings or words having different usages than I was expecting. Is there anything I can do to make my searches more complete?

The Document Search function has three Search Options that can help by making the search less precise. The more literal a search is, the more things like misspellings can be missed.

The three Search Options in the Document Search are as follows:

• Phonetic Search (Sounds like) – This option helps find words in your documents that don’t match your search values letter for letter. Phonetic searching essentially reduces each word to a phonetic syllable or groups of syllables in both your search values and the information in the files. This will increase the number of hits your search will find, but has the downside of likely finding hits that do not match what you’re looking for.
• Stemming (Grammatically similar phrase) – This option helps find words with similar endings. For example, the word “Supply” could also be found as “Supplied,” “Supplies,” and “Supplying”.
• Fuzzy Search (Common misspellings) – This option helps compensate for common typographical errors and misspellings (i.e., misspelled variations of the words). This option is paired with a Fuzziness Level (1-5) setting, which controls the degree to which misspelled words are included. A fuzziness level of 1 would be minor misspellings whereas 5 would be words with greater differences.

Using any of these options can help to increase your search to find words and phrases that you may have been missing!