OfficePower PowerSearch

Full Text Retrieval for OfficePower

PowerSearch is a full text retrieval application for use with OfficePower 2000 (or OfficePower/Xtra). It indexes the contents of all the documents within a specified collection. These documents can be OfficePower Word, MS Word for Windows, Lotus AmiPro, Corel Wordperfect if the PowerConverters Standard pack is available to users.

A collection is defined as one or more OfficePower folders. PowerSearch searches a specified collection or collections for words and phrases specified by the user and locates and displays a list of documents containing them. From the display the documents can be processed in a number of ways including viweing, updating, printing, attaching to a mail item, and copying. If PowerConverters are available the documents can be converted to different types.

Indexing

Document Indexing is done automatically (usually overnight), reflecting the contents of documents modified, added, or deleted since the last indexing. There is provision for a list of stopwords which are words to be excluded from the index, usually because they are very commonly used and therefore not useful for indexing.

Searching

PowerSearch may be used to locate an individual document, or to identify relevant material across a set of documents. The search is of a system or user default collection, or of one or more (up to three) specified collections.

The material to be located may be defined by specifying:-

• individual words
• word stems (which must specify the first character, e.g. pr or proc for processor)
• phrases
• words within a specified proximity of each other
• boolean combinations (i.e. "and", "or", "not")
• "wild cards" may be used for any character except the first
• certain attributes external to the document, both system-supplied (e.g. date last updated) and user-supplied keywords (added during a PowerSearch session)

There is a facility to specify rules for recognising word variations that should be found by a search (e.g. plurals; the "thesaurus" facility).

Search Results

The search results in a list of documents, which is displayed as a set of OfficePower records. These records may be sorted, searched, marked, and printed in the normal OfficePower way. From the display the documents can be processed in a number of ways including viweing, updating, printing, attaching to a mail item, and copying. If Powerconverters are available the documents can be converted to different types.

Alternatively, each document may be examined further for the contexts in which search "hits" occurred. In this case the document is displayed through the OfficePower word processor but with the ability to skip from context to context, and it is possible to use the facilities of the OfficePower word processor in VIEW mode (in order, for example, to copy sections of text into a phrase library used as a "scrap book").

Technical Specifications

PowerSearch is available for OfficePower 2000 (or OfficePower/Xtra) under ICL DRS/NX, UNIXWARE 2 or 7, or SUN SOLARIS.

To allow indexing and subsequent searching, displaying and processing on non OfficePower Word documents, the PowerConverter Standard Pack must be available.

FS-PSRCH

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