I’ve been using the % wildcard in SugarCRM, well, as long as I’ve been using Sugar. But one of my colleagues just taught me additional wildcards!

First, a refresher on the use of % in Sugar. Sugar uses % as the standard wildcard in a search, and it works with both global and module searches. Without a wildcard, Sugar searches default to a “starts with” search. This means, for example, a search for “Advisors” would not find the account named “Technology Advisors, Inc.” The trick to searching within the middle of a field is to use the wildcard character, which is the % symbol. You can put the % symbol in front of a search to change it from a “starts with” search to a “contains” search. To continue with the example from above, searching for “%Advisors” will find the account “Technology Advisors, Inc.” even though searching “Advisors” will not.

I was excited to learn recently that there are additional wildcards available:

• In List View searches, the _ wildcard stands for one character. For example, searching for “M_g” will find Meg and Megan but not Ming.
• In Global searches, the ? wildcard stands for one character. (Too bad they couldn’t use the same for both search tools!)
• In Global searches, you can add an AND between words to find only results matching both words. For example, searching “John Smith” will find John Smith, John Doe, and Jane Smith, while searching “John AND Smith” will only find John Smith. Happy searching!