Nice feature - thanks for adding it.

We definitely prefer that the tag filtering defaults to 2) List all Contacts that have “ALL three tags selected”

If we need to see ANY tag, we can just search for a single tag.

What fun!

Kathleen

unfortunately, both would be perfect for us.

ANY allows you to quickly see groups of contacts / blogs / companies - so for me, in companies ANY “bars, restaurants, and hotels”

whereas ALL would be great for contact search “Paris, Art”

I think ANY is potentially more useful but as the database grows, being able to make more strict filter requirements will be really important - if you had to implement one now and one later, I’d say ANY and then ALL.

You make a good point but . . .

If you want to find ANY bars, restaurants, hotels - you can do so by searching for each tag - a bit more cumbersome but it will work

The only way to find companies that have ALL of the attributes of restaurant, bar, hotel would be the ALL filter.

Therefore, we would vote for ALL first and then ANY.

Thanks for adding the multiple tags feature!  for me ALL of the three tags is more useful, because if I were to search for a contact I could just search for it under all contacts.

We’re using Tags for client names.

So ANY is more useful to us. That way you could quickly build a list for people who are associated with Client A, OR Client B, OR Client C.

peterlkelley - Jan 14, 2009 09:05am

We’re using Tags for client names.

So ANY is more useful to us. That way you could quickly build a list for people who are associated with Client A, OR Client B, OR Client C.

ah, that’s a clever way to deal with subcontractors!

though I think the best way to do that would be to make the “related to” field more robust and designate different relations per contact / company / blog - maybe we’ll see more of development there in the future?

I think the best way to do that would be to make the “related to” field more robust and designate different relations per contact / company / blog - maybe we’ll see more of development there in the future?

Actually, along with printing we are currently working on adding a value to the Related-To feature that lets you comment on what the relation is.

I would find the tags working by ALL as the most useful.

I would structure my tags to include broader fields such as: North American contacts, European contacts, Africa Contacts, and then selective tags such as projectA, projectB, projectC.

Congratulations. I think you have just created a defining USP for Solve360.

New feature today, when filtering by multiple tags you now have the option of returning records that match any of the selected tags, or match all of the selected tags.

Is there a reason that the system has been built to only accommodate one or the other?
I think the filtering/search functionality is the currently the biggest weakness of Solve360.  I would LOVE to see more robust filtering capability including the full line of boolean operators.

Example: Category tags include A,B,C, and D.  I want to make a list of all my contacts who have tag “A” AND either “B” OR “C” but NOT “D” (also written as [A (B OR C) -D].
I don’t think there is a way to do this right now; am I wrong?

To make things more complicated, I’d love to be able to filter by multiple contact/company criteria (with the same Boolean rules, of course), for instance filtering by both “Category Tags” and “Assigned To”
Example: Filter contacts by the above Category tag criteria—[A (B OR C) -D]—but only including those contacts who are “Assigned To” [Joe OR Steve].

I’d be interested to know whether others have the same desire.

Engineering SpecialOps - Jan 12, 2009 02:17pm

You can now filter by selecting multiple tags at once under contacts, companies and blogs.  Before we “lock it up” we’d like to know if if it is more helpful for the search to work as an “AND” or as an “OR”?  For example, which of the options is more useful to your work processes:

1) List all Contacts that have “ANY of the three tags selected”, or
2) List all Contacts that have “ALL three tags selected”

My gut reaction was for Tags = AND or = match ALL.  But after thinking more about it and my business process around S360, if I had a choice, I would use tags match ANY or OR (1 or more matches on multiple tag sorts).  It goes without saying, that multiple levels of filters would be great, and having both options would be great, but if I had to choose…. :)

Actually since this post was made some time ago we implemented the ability to filter on both options.  When you choose a second tag the option is added to the filter.

It would be extremely useful to have a “but NOT” feature as well. As a PR agency we are creating a ton of tags to sort the thousands of contacts we have. The one thing missing from the ability to really sort out and pull the lists of people we need for any given press contact is the ability to exclude people we don’t want.

Yes, this is what I was trying to say in a better way. I agree that this is the biggest weakness of Solve360 as I see it.

dpt - May 02, 2010 10:11pm

Is there a reason that the system has been built to only accommodate one or the other?
I think the filtering/search functionality is the currently the biggest weakness of Solve360.  I would LOVE to see more robust filtering capability including the full line of boolean operators.

Example: Category tags include A,B,C, and D.  I want to make a list of all my contacts who have tag “A” AND either “B” OR “C” but NOT “D” (also written as [A (B OR C) -D].
I don’t think there is a way to do this right now; am I wrong?

To make things more complicated, I’d love to be able to filter by multiple contact/company criteria (with the same Boolean rules, of course), for instance filtering by both “Category Tags” and “Assigned To”
Example: Filter contacts by the above Category tag criteria—[A (B OR C) -D]—but only including those contacts who are “Assigned To” [Joe OR Steve].

I’d be interested to know whether others have the same desire.

Engineering SpecialOps - Jan 12, 2009 02:17pm

You can now filter by selecting multiple tags at once under contacts, companies and blogs.  Before we “lock it up” we’d like to know if if it is more helpful for the search to work as an “AND” or as an “OR”?  For example, which of the options is more useful to your work processes:

1) List all Contacts that have “ANY of the three tags selected”, or
2) List all Contacts that have “ALL three tags selected”

dpt - May 02, 2010 10:11pm

Is there a reason that the system has been built to only accommodate one or the other?
I think the filtering/search functionality is the currently the biggest weakness of Solve360.  I would LOVE to see more robust filtering capability including the full line of boolean operators.

Example: Category tags include A,B,C, and D.  I want to make a list of all my contacts who have tag “A” AND either “B” OR “C” but NOT “D” (also written as [A (B OR C) -D].
I don’t think there is a way to do this right now; am I wrong?

To make things more complicated, I’d love to be able to filter by multiple contact/company criteria (with the same Boolean rules, of course), for instance filtering by both “Category Tags” and “Assigned To”
Example: Filter contacts by the above Category tag criteria—[A (B OR C) -D]—but only including those contacts who are “Assigned To” [Joe OR Steve].

I’d be interested to know whether others have the same desire.

Engineering SpecialOps - Jan 12, 2009 02:17pm

You can now filter by selecting multiple tags at once under contacts, companies and blogs.  Before we “lock it up” we’d like to know if if it is more helpful for the search to work as an “AND” or as an “OR”?  For example, which of the options is more useful to your work processes:

1) List all Contacts that have “ANY of the three tags selected”, or
2) List all Contacts that have “ALL three tags selected”

+1 to dpt’s comment. Boolean operators would make S360 vastly more powerful and I believe would deliver the most ROI to users of any new feature. Yes, it is possible to manually filter and create temporary “NOT” tags, but that is more than a little cumbersome. I’m already a Solve enthusiast, this addition would make me a raving enthusiast.

I definitely agree - it should be a simple addition to add “matching none” to the list of “matching any” & “matching all” searches. That would have saved us a lot of trouble today, as we were trying to output a marketing email list, while excluding people that shouldn’t be on it by tag (Not yet contacted, requested no email, etc.)

That wouldn’t get into a more complex search - I’d also like to see a separate “advanced search” screen for the occasional times we might need to do a “(((A or B) and C) but not D)“ type search. But the “matching none” option would cover us in most circumstances, and I was kind of surprised to find it wasn’t available.

Robert Scott - Dec 21, 2010 11:57am

I definitely agree - it should be a simple addition to add “matching none” to the list of “matching any” & “matching all” searches. That would have saved us a lot of trouble today, as we were trying to output a marketing email list, while excluding people that shouldn’t be on it by tag (Not yet contacted, requested no email, etc.)

Actually there’s a search option for untagged records: Show > Additional Filters > Uncategorized.

Actually there’s a search option for untagged records: Show > Additional Filters > Uncategorized.

Thanks - I did see the uncategorized option, and maybe I wasn’t clear in what I was saying. “Matching none” of a list of tags, isn’t the same as having no tags. If I select three tags that I don’t want to include, and select “matching none” it should provide a list that consists of all those who don’t have any of those three tags, but may well have several other tags.

For example, we have contacts who are clients, contacts who are prospects that we’ve communicated with, and also people who we plan to reach out to but haven’t spoken to yet. The last group should be excluded from marketing, but we don’t have a way to usefully do so when coming up with a mailing list. Obviously we could leave that tag off when doing a search by tags, but those people may well have other tags that should be included (for example, their industry, or their source they were imported from).

The workaround we’ve had to use is to create a temporary “mailing list” tag, add all contacts to it, then individually remove that tag from each group that needs to be excluded.

I hear you Robert. I misinterpreted your statement. I agree and will add that ultimately a full boolean operator advanced search would do the trick. Thanks for the feedback.

+1 here on the full search capability. ALSO the ability to save your searches

+1 for better tag filtering.  We need the ability to say, “show tag1, and tag2, along with either tag3, or tag4.

Appency - Aug 01, 2010 10:57am

It would be extremely useful to have a “but NOT” feature as well. As a PR agency we are creating a ton of tags to sort the thousands of contacts we have. The one thing missing from the ability to really sort out and pull the lists of people we need for any given press contact is the ability to exclude people we don’t want.

I could not agree more.  I have a need right now to find a list of people who meet a single criteria (Have attended a particular event).  However, from that list of positive responses I need to exclude 3 different groups, each of whom have followed up in a unique, different way, and should not be receiving a particular mailing.

Can I be provocative here.  For 15 years I worked with a great piece of software on Mac, called NOW CONTACT.  It was getting towards the end of its useful life, and unfortunately its successor didn’t clear the ground on take-off.  That was a year ago, and it has taken me until now to find Solve360.  It is the closest thing to what I wanted as a replacement by a long way.  Actually, this goes way beyond it any many ways, but there were some important features missing in S360.

The search functions in NOW CONTACT really were great.  It was possible to pull out a list from within the database, and then work on just that list.  It was possible to further add to that list by further refining the search, or to ‘hide’ people from that list based on some other criteria.  I guess we are talking Boolean searching.

Guys, this would really push you over the edge (positively) for me.  In the meantime, I am off to work out how to draft out the names I don’t want to send an email to from those that I do.  It could be a long day!!

Bruce Ward

@blw Thanks for the feedback and insight.  While it’s not the solution you are hoping for a tactic you can use today is to create a “Scratch” tag, where you populate it based on previous searches to get a new result i.e. you can add/remove tags in bulk

e.g. empty scratch, find results, add them to scratch, find next results remove them from scratch to shape the set you need

A lot of this is beating around the bush of not being able to filter by multiple fields.

Why create dozens of tags when form fields (with multi-select, drop downs etc.) could achieve a lot of this.

TO this day, I cannot create a way to find:
  (TAG) A client
  (Multi select) Who wants Service A
  (Drop Down) Who has less than <10 people in the company
  (Drop down) Who is in the North East Region of the USA

This is increasingly a deal breaker for people as their businesses grow inside of Solve360.

Why create custom fields at all?

dpt - May 02, 2010 10:11pm

Is there a reason that the system has been built to only accommodate one or the other?
I think the filtering/search functionality is the currently the biggest weakness of Solve360.  I would LOVE to see more robust filtering capability including the full line of boolean operators.

Example: Category tags include A,B,C, and D.  I want to make a list of all my contacts who have tag “A” AND either “B” OR “C” but NOT “D” (also written as [A (B OR C) -D].
I don’t think there is a way to do this right now; am I wrong?

To make things more complicated, I’d love to be able to filter by multiple contact/company criteria (with the same Boolean rules, of course), for instance filtering by both “Category Tags” and “Assigned To”
Example: Filter contacts by the above Category tag criteria—[A (B OR C) -D]—but only including those contacts who are “Assigned To” [Joe OR Steve].

I’d be interested to know whether others have the same desire.

Yes this would be a great feature as we often want to exclude some tags

Engineering SpecialOps - Dec 21, 2010 02:20pm

I hear you Robert. I misinterpreted your statement. I agree and will add that ultimately a full boolean operator advanced search would do the trick. Thanks for the feedback.

Any progress on this? I’m finding that the search limitations are really making solve difficult to use. To me, full featured search is vital.

Not at this point HP15C.

Engineering SpecialOps - Oct 27, 2011 11:12am

Not at this point HP15C.

Iv’e been using solve for about a year now and I’m getting a lot of contacts in the system. The lack of a more customisable search is rapidly becoming painful and making the system more and more unworkable.

Can you please advise on an implementation timetable?

There’s no announcement currently, but we are carefully documenting and reviewing all suggestions as they relate to search features.