i am compiling a database of course curriculum in university planning programs for a professor. i have organized the material by university and then by each course, including specific info for each course such as syllabus, prof name, course number, description, etc

i would like to include with each course a field that contains keywords to show what category the course falls into: design, economics, theory, history, etc.

the issue is that courses will often fall into many categories, so i would like to include 10 or so descriptive words for each course (within one field)

then id like the professors to be able to easily search that field for words from the category keyword list. so the field might have ten words in it, but the professor might be searching for all courses that fall under "theory"

how do you search the field for one word within a string of text? additionally, is there a way to search for say, two of the words, like "theory OR history" perhaps? are there boolean commands for the find feature? am very new to this and any help would be much appreciated

By default FMP normally performs "contains" type searches, so you need do nothing to find a word (or part-word) within the field. Prepending "==" and "==" to the search criteria modifies this behaviour.

To perform OR searches, create multiple find requests, each with one criteria in it.

Find requests I have done thus far do the default search for words that appear as the first word in a text string. (as opposed to within the string) I also read information in the help topics that explains the find feature will automatically search this way (for initial words not any words)

Any thoughts or ideas to help?

The default FMP find looks for WORDS that START with the specified search string. For example, a record that contains "design economics theory history" will be found by searching for "history", "his" or "h", but NOT by "istory".