PK Tip: Running a Faster Find

Personal Knowbase's Find command (from the Edit menu) takes longer as the number (and length) of articles grows. The software does a straight string search for Find, so the search time is a function of the amount of text searched. Here are some tips for speeding up your Find operations.

These tips also apply to the Replace command.

Search Only Titles

One thing you can do to make searches faster is to put key information that you know you're likely to search for in the article titles, then use the Find dialog box's Title Text Only option. For example, for email archives, I put the correspondents' names in the title to make it easier to search for names.

Title-only searches are particularly faster after the first search within a PK session, because the titles are cached in computer memory after the first time they are accessed. Article content is slower to search because PK needs to retrieve it from your hard drive.

Use Search Range

When possible, also trim down the Search Range by selecting a keyword or two in the Index Window first, then searching with a Search Range of Selected Articles. For example, for my email archive, I use a keyword family for emails from relatives. If I know that what I'm looking for was in an email from a relative, I select the family keyword first and use the Selected Articles range. Then PK only has to search that subset of articles.

You can reduce the number of articles to search even further by highlighting articles' titles in the Titles column and using the Search Range of Highlighted Articles. To highlight a subset of the titles currently shown, see our tip for Selecting Multiple Items in a List.

Use a Date Range

Use the article date field to accurately reflect the date of an article's data. Then, you can also reduce the number of articles searched by using a date range from the Find dialog box so that PK only has to search a date-based subset.

By changing the options in your Find dialog box, you can significantly speed up your search operations.