VBA Search Engine Dilemma

[PoseidanSpartan]

Hello from Asia Minor,
I am far away from home and my reference material is not with me.
Dilemma: I have been asked to create a program from scratch that will have a search engine built into it, searching for personal data at a sentry post, to make it easier than searching through tons of papers printed out which change daily, weekly and monthly. Drawing on what little programming language I know, I have composed something. However, the language I learned was PASCAL, not VBA. I am quickly learning access, but time is NOT on my side.
Bottom Line: Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Anyone have any samples or ideas to get me going?
I have all of the forms, and colorful pazzaz, but I am really counting on this search engine as being the heart of my project.
Anything would be greatly appreciated.
-Soldier in Afghanistan

[NeoPa]

Before you can build a search engine of any form you need to have developed a very clear understanding of what you want to search in as well as what you want to search for (which may well include multiple options).

As a very basic, conceptual, answer I would say that you need a massive form which displays as much detail as possible using boound controls (The whole form being bound to a query which shows all the information required, including, but not necessarily limited to, all data that you may wish to search on.), as well as various unbound controls that you would use to specify the information to search for.

Actually, the concept is filtering rather than searching, but that is more how you must think of it technically than how users need to think of it. Example Filtering on a Form can help you with the whole concept.

Good luck, and God Bless.

[PoseidanSpartan]

Wow! Simply put and very informative. I will try your concept.
By the Way, the term cascading means that when a certain condition is met, more of the form can come into view, right? I don't want the user to be overwhelmed with info, but I do want more options to pop up if certain criterion are met. If that is cascading, then I need to not only learn filtering, but cascading as well. Again, Thank you for your intuition and helping me by reading between the lines as well.
Very Gratefully,
Sam

[NeoPa]

Cascaded filtering can be explained by thinking of a hierarchical system (See Cascaded Form Filtering if you haven't already). In its simplest form we might have the following data :
Top level - Battalion

[U][B]Battalion[/B][/U]
A
B
C

Middle level - Platoon

[U][B]Platoon  Battalion[/B][/U]
A1          A
A2          A
A3          A
B1          B
B2          B
B3          B
C1          C
C2          C
C3          C

Data to show on form - Soldiers

[U][B]Soldier  Platoon[/B][/U]
Anderson    A1
Best        A2
Clarke      A3
Denning     B1
Evans       B2
Fuller      B3
Grigg       C1
Hughes      C2
Innes       C3
Jones       A1
Kinnear     A2
Lewis       A3
Muller      B1
Nicholls    B2
O'Donnell   B3
Potter      C1
Quinn       C2
Rowlands    C3

I'm sure my example data is totally ridiculous, but it gives an illustration of the concept anyway.

The form would have unbound ComboBoxes set to display the lists of Battalions and Platoons. The form would display only those soldiers that belonged to the platoon selected in the Platoon ComboBox. The hierarchical element though is that the list of Platoons would also be dependent on the value selected from the Battalion ComboBox.

Thus, you might select Battalion B, which would restrict the list of Platoons to B1, B2 & B3, then select Platoon B2, which would restrict the records on the form to Evans and Nicholls.

[Mihail]

Hello !
My English is not enough good so maybe I am wrong; but I understand that the data are (exist) in electronic format but you have not a search engine to find a certain information.
If this is the situation let us to know. More than provide more details about how the data are stored.