I’ve been scratching my head about this. I’ve used most contact management systems and mostly, they are crap. Highrise is a breath of fresh air.

Why is there not a more robust search function? I’d like to use this for my small biz. I have an initial contact list of 200 names. How do I sort and find these contacts? My only option in HRise is to use the first name (I deal w/ consumers, so no company). A misspelled name could make a record impossible to find.

I see that some companies are implementing HRise, but with 1000 or more names for a sales and support dept., how is this possible?

The HR search facility is very weak. In Mac OS X Address Book you can search on any word: a surname, a job function, a fragment of a postcode or telephone code… anything.

HR has some limitations which one might perhaps forgive as being inherent in the way it’s built. But a half hashed facility like this is hard to put up with when you have thousands of entries.

They should go one step further and install an advanced search so that you could for example find every “courier” in postcode “BH20”.

I wonder whether it’s a speed tradeoff?

This search issue is the first thing we complained about. I just imported 4000 records and searching them by last name only is a royal pain in the butt. Especially when you get used to gmail where you can type any part of a person’s first name, last name, email address, physical address, or any other piece of information saved in there contact data.

If the trade off is for speed then I don’t understand why the implementation would narrow the results for every letter entered. This is pretty slow in itself. I would prefer an old school lookup mechanism that was a more robust search over the current Ajax model that only searches last names, slowly. Better yet just hijack the Gmail style in line popup. That thing is the best I have seen.

My only option in HRise is to use the first name (I deal w/ consumers, so no company).

You can search by first name, last name, or company name in the contacts search field.

For example, if someone is named “Ann Rosenblum” you can type “Rose” in the contacts search field and Ann Rosenblum will be listed. Or you can type “Ann” and Ann Rosenblum will show up as well.

“You can search by first name, last name, or company name in the contacts search field.”

However, the company name is sequential only. So if you have a company named “Joe Kilroy’s Mattress Emporium” a search for “Joe” would return the correct result while a search for:

“Kilroy”
“Mattress”
or “Emporium”

Would return no results. Pretty annoying.

37S: THIS IS A GREAT APP! Thank you for all you’ve put into it, and I know you’re not done yet.

However, there is an apparent need for more flexibility in the way HR finds and manipulates data. One of these things is the search functionality. Yes, for us at least, ADVANCED SEARCH OPTIONS ARE A MUST. I would love to find “all calls in the Sacramento area due today.” I’ve posted more on this here (there seems to be about 3-4 threads on this… must be important :)

Greetings,
I know this sounds strange, but try putting ’%’ before the subsection that you’re searching for.

I don’t have a lot of contacts, but if I have one ‘CyberFOX Software Inc’, and if I put ‘cyberfox’, it finds it. If I put ‘software’, it doesn’t. If I put ‘%software’, it finds it.

The ’%’ symbol is a wildcard in some contexts, which is what made me try it.

Post here if it works, since my data set is too small to be comfortable saying it works for everything. :)

— Morgan

Nice tip Morgan! Works a treat with our database.

wow – are we serious here? i found this thread bc I was having this same obvious problem and Morgan’s tip solved it for me too – but for crisakes cant this one be fixed?

FYI, we added advanced search in March: