Incremental Find ?

Posted by jimspoon
Jul 14, 2009 at 05:16 AM

I am a big fan of an “incremental find” - the program filters your database as you type in the search string or phrase. The list of matching items shrinks as you type in more characters. It’s a big time saver.

For a table of data, with data fields stored in columns, I’d like the ability to have incremental find available in a box at the top of each column. Say there is a “Last Name” column - I’d like to be able to type in characters in the box to narrow search results to items with those characters in the Last Name field. Something like the Autofilter available in Excel or OpenOffice.org Calc, but with the incremental find implemented.

Incremental find would also be great for searching not only for the text contained in a data field, but also tags, or data field names. I’ve seen that in the Delicious extension for Firefox.

Has anybody seen a PIM that makes good use of incremental find?

Here’s a Wikipedia article about incremental find:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_find