Using Find and Replace in Notes field? 1

[tombillet]

My tasks have several lines of text in the notes field. Using the Find or Find and Replace in MS Project only searches the first line of text in the notes field. Does anyone know of a way to make Project search the remaining lines of text in the notes field?

Thanks,
Tom

 

[PDQBach]

I just tested a plan and had no problems using Find.

There's a small "gotcha" on Find (ctrl+f).

The default field that it searches is Name. You must manually change the field to Notes in order to search that field.

Once you change the field to Notes, it will default to Notes until you change the field name to something else or until you exit and restart Project.

There's an "issue" about the field size. It is not unlimited. Project Help says that a maximum of 255 characters can be stored in a text field. (I thought I recalled a bigger number but maybe my memory is failing.)

There's also an issue with the size of the data in the Notes field in P98 if you use a VB macro on the Notes field. (It's fixed in P98 SR-1.)

 

[tombillet]

PDQBach,

I have finally had a chance to test you recommendation. However, after testing using MS Project 2000 I have found that it does NOT find any text in the note field beyond the first line. In the FIND dialog box, I changed the field to the NOTES field and it didn't make a difference. PDQBach, have you tried typing multiple lines of text in the notes field and then attempted to use the FIND command to locate any of the text below the first line? Make sure to press the enter key between the lines in the notes field.

Thanks,
Tom

 

[PDQBach]

You're absolutely right! I misinterpreted your initial question.

For those of you following this thread, I created a note by
1. displaying the Notes column
2. changing the row height
3. entering enough text ("Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.") so that there were multiple lines.

TomBillet created his note by
1. double-clicking on the task which opens up a tabbed dialog box.
2. clicking on the Notes tab
3. entering some text ("Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party")
4. pressing <return>
5. entering more text ("The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog")
6. clicking on OK to close the dialog box.

In both cases, we pressed Ctrl+F to search and changed the field name to search from the default (Name) to Notes.

If you search for "party", both entries will be found.

If you search for "fox", it will be found in my data entry but not in Tom Billet's.

I agree with his assessment that Find fails in the circumstances that he describes.

I'm going to play around with this for a while and see if I can find out anything additional.

Note to the moderators: somebody gave me a star for my initial (erroneous!) reply. If possible, please remove it. Thanks.

 

[PDQBach]

Some research, some facts, some speculation.

The "in memory" data structures used to hold the data displayed on the screen differ from the external data structures used to hold the data stored on disk.

The in memory data structures are highly intertwined making it difficult to change anything because seemingly trivial changes ripple throughout the in memory storage structure. (After all, there are more than a dozen views that have to be considered and I'm sure there are many references to offsets which consider a maximum field length of 255.)

So ... at some point in the past, the in memory data display structure probably mirrored very closely the external data storage structure including a notes field of 255 characters. But, for a variety of reasons, MS decided to implement a larger Notes field.

The implementation that had the least impact on existing in memory data structures and code was to set it up so that a larger piece of text could be stored externally and a small part of that data (up to 255 characters or a <cr/lf> -- whichever came first) was available for display on the screen.

(Remember, too, that there was a time when 640K was enough for everyone -- Gates didn't actually say anything like that but people believe it anyway.)

So, now there was the best of both worlds: an easily handled change to the in memory data structure (in other words: none); an easily implemented external data storage structure (in other words: the pop-up window with 6 tabs that you see when you double-click on a task) that let the user actually store significantly more information in the external data storage structure.

There was a drawback: the search function was designed to search the in memory data structure (which holds only the first 255 characters or until the first <cr/lf>).

MS had several choices: change the in memory data structure; change the search functionality; live with the constraint that search wouldn't find anything after the first 255 characters (or the first <cr/lf>.

They made the decision that I would have made: minimal impact and live with the constraint.

Only one question remains: when? I'd guess that it was very, very early on. Does anyone have Project 4.0 (or earlier) installed and running. The test is simple: which is the earliest release where double-clicking on the task opens a tabbed window that has a Notes field which holds more than 255 characters?