Searching for a security with one letter

System

This discussion was created from comments split from: Security Transactions.

tmplee

@RickO A comment about search on security symbol (thanks, by the way, for drawing our attention to the magnifying glass to limit a search to a particular field). If the ticker symbol is only one letter (e.g. T for AT&T) it won't find it. Seems to work fine for 2 or more letters, although if the symbol you are looking for is contained in some other ticker symbol, you'll find ones with that symbol too. So, if you search for BA you'll also get BATRA and CHUBA.

RickO

I wasn't even aware that there are single character symbols. Learned something today. I think the program is waiting for you to type at least two characters before it starts searching as it does in all fields.

I would suggest you use menu Help > Report a Problem to submit this to Quicken.

jacobs

Yes, Search does not work for a single character -- intentionally. In the early days of Quicken 2015, single character searches worked, and it resulted in painfully slow search speeds. In the case above, where you've limited the search to the Symbol column, it might not be too bad -- but a search for "T" will still find all Symbols with the letter T. But imagine if you forgot t set the search just for that column: Quicken would search all columns for everything with the letter "t" -- resulting in a spinning beachball for quite awhile, and then a worthless set of thousands of results.

So I would be strongly against them allowing Search to work on one letter again.

In this case, the workaround is pretty easy: type AT&T or &T to find what you're looking for.

If we want to propose a program change to the developers, I'd suggest an alternative: search operators. Right now, search is globally "everything containing" searches. But it would be helpful if you could type quote marks ( "T") or an equal sign (=T) to specify you want Quicken to search for only exact matches. these kind of searches are natively built into SQL, so adding searches of Quicken's SQL database using contains or matches or wildcards might be a fairly easy development task to implement.