You can use Equilibrium’s Product Finder to quickly locate any item in a manufacturer’s catalog. You can either search by the CODE, or the DESCRIPTION of the products.
NOTE: When you search in the CODE field, it’s looking for an exact match on the 1st characters you type. Meaning if I search for “W42” it will find anything that STARTS with W42 (not if it has W42 somewhere later in the code like BFW42).
The DESCRIPTION field searches for what you type ANYWHERE in the description.
In addition to searching for a specific code, you can use a couple of special “wildcards” in your searches to make finding the right code a breeze.
The possible wildcards that can be used in search are these:
Asterisk: *
Underscore: _
USING THE * WILDCARD
The * (asterisk) works as an “anything” wildcard, meaning that it represents any characters, and any number of them as well. Basically, the * character will match anything in its place.
* In the CODE Field
For example, using W*42 in a CODE search might return the following:
- W1242L
- W1542L SR
- WXF1542-R
- W anything here 42 whatever
If you used *42, you would broaden it to results like this:
- B42
- BK1842
- ACF342-xyz
- anything…42…anything
You can compound the * to find multiple terms as well, like *W*42*L. That would find any codes with a W, then a 42, then an L anywhere in the code (no matter what was before, in-between, or after).
* In DESCRIPTION FIELD
If you use * in the DESCRIPTION field, you can do things like finding ANY 2 (or more) words that appear in the description.
For example, if you searched for “base*storage” you would see any results with the word “base” and “storage” (in that order) in the description, no matter what was before, in-between, or after those words.
You can even combine multiple words like base*storage*42 which would return anything with those 3 terms in it (again, in that order).
USING THE _ WILDCARD
The _ (underscore) character acts as a specific character wildcard, meaning you can use it to specify the number of characters.
For example, W_42 would return anything that has ONE character AFTER the “W” and BEFORE the “42”, such as:
- W2424-2D
- W942L
- W942R
If you used two underscores, like W__42, it would result in anything with 2 characters AFTER the “W” and BEFORE the “42” (but it would NOT return the ones above since there is only 1 character before the 42):
- W1242L
- W2442R
- W3642
COMBINING WILDCARDS
Finally, you can combine any wildcards you want in either search field. For example, if you wanted to find all drawer bases that have rollout trays and you know the code starts with the number of drawers (i.e. 2db…) and it has an “RT” in there for rollouts, you could do the following:
Searching for _db*rt would find anything that has 1 character before the “db” and then has an “rt” anywhere after it (whether searching in CODE or DESCRIPTION).
Experiment with it and learn to find things quickly!
