ProjectLoad Blog

There are several places throughout the system that allow you to look for a project by name. The most familiar is probably the “New Activity” option at the bottom of the daily timesheet, but there are others in the reporting, projects, and activities pages. When you type characters into the name box to find projects, the system performs a search that assumes you want to find any project that has a short name or a full name that matches on any part of the letters you typed. Thus if you specify “fin” you would get projects like “Financial System Support” and “Findley High School Construction” but also projects with names like “Human Resources Staffing System”. If you include an asterisk “*” in the search string, that tells the system not to assume you will accept the characters anywhere you typed. For example, if you type in “fin*”, then the system will only return projects with a short name or a full name that starts with the letters fin rather than containing fin anywhere in the name. You can do the same thing to find project names that end with certain characters like “* update” to find only projects that end with the word update.

This capability can also be useful if the project managers follow a naming convention for assigning short names to projects. If all projects that pertain to a particular group start with specific letters, they can be found more easily. For example, all projects that support the Financial Department could start with FN and when a user needs to look up a financial project they could specify “FN*” in the search field.