Wintotal Find Issue: To many reports returned by Find.
Wintotal does not have any Archive Functions. The only way to reduce the “DATABASE” size is to remove the reports from the \Wintotal\Files sub folder where all wintotal files are stored.
Doing this means you will never again be able to search or view these files. That is not an archival process. I won’t bore you with the technical details of why doing this is a very bad idea and move forward to what might be a simpler solution to the issue of a search request returning to many reports.
The simple solution is to use the Wintotal ‘Advanced Find’ feature. It works very well and is very fast. The Advanced find will allow you select or ‘eliminate’ items from the search results based on a variety of search fields. For example, I can search for an appraisal based on the ‘Report Description’ field but only search reports between the dates 1/5/2009 – 1/12/2009 and with a zip code of 08225, thus returning only the reports that match my search criteria.
The Advanced find is right next to the Find Now button which is
in the top right corner of Wintotals File cabinet.
Using this link will open a dialog box that offers many options you can use to quantify your search request where I was able to select all documents between the year 1999 and 2004 within seconds. By the way, our database has 9481 reports and 4719 of them were created between 1999 and 2004.
If I were to move those 4,719 reports out of the wintotal Files directory, they will not be searchable in Wintotal again. Also, because of the way Wintotal Names reports, visually finding a file by its ‘filename’ may be impossible if report files are created using the Internal Order Number which is meaningless.
Using the Advanced Find in wintotal provides a solution to your search issues.
Remember, search using as little information needed to identify the target property; or said another way, if you ask for to much, you may find nothing.
Also, you can drag the Advanced Search window over to your second monitor so it stays open for repeated queries.
Michael Angelo
Information Technology Consultant
609-641-6392