Understanding Filters in Organizer’s Toolbox
PRINTYour database is filled with millions of pieces of information but it does you no good unless you can easily retrieve that information efficiently. Think of your Toolbox as a filing cabinet with records filed in drawers and folders. If your filing cabinet is organized alphabetically by workers last names you’d open up the drawer and search through until you found the record you were looking for. But what if you wanted to find everyone in a particular department at the hospital you’re organizing? You would have to look through one whole drawer in the filing cabinet to find all those records that meet that criteria. Or what if you want to find only the Unit Secretaries and Housekeepers who are assessed as 3’s and work on a particular floor on a hospital campus with three buildings and 2,500 employees? You can see how difficult something like that might be.
A database makes storing and finding particular pieces of information much easier. The Filter in Organizers’ Toolbox enables you to ask a question and get an answer in a matter of moments rather than hours. (For database geeks out there this is referred to as a “query”.)
Once you access the filter in Organizers’ Toolbox you’ll notice three distinct areas that you’ll need to become familiar with:
- Summary – this is a listing of what fields you have selected for your filter
- Folder list – the folder list roughly corresponds to the various tabs you work with in the person form
- Fields within the folders – this is where you actually select the criteria that yu want to apply your filter
To access the field list, first click on a folder containing the information you want to filter. For example, to filter for a particular employer, you’ll click on the “Jobs” folder. A list of the different fields