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Document management

Search in the document

Contract Express allows users to search for specific content in the selected document set, filtered by a datasheet. Users can create advanced search queries to find the documents best fit to the flexible search criteria.
Contract Express allows you to search among both auto-generated and manually uploaded documents in pdf and .docx formats. You also can search for documents in other languages, if you have them on your Contract Express site.
note
  1. Search will look for your document only among the documents of the selected tab with applied datasheet. If you cannot find the required document, consider selecting another tab and/ datasheet and search again.
  2. Currently you can only search on the
    Documents
     tab and it is not available for matters.
  3. If Search option is not available on the Documents tab, check whether search is enabled in
    Admin > Features
     for the required document status (see Enabling search in documents).

Stop words

Stop words are the most common words in a language.
For the English language, some of these stop words are: "a", "an", "and", "are", "as", "at", "be", "but", "by", "for", "if", "in", "into", "is", "it", "no", "not", "of", "on", "or", "such", "that", "the", "their", "then", "there", "these", "they", "this", "to", "was", "will", "with".
These words cannot be used for searching by themselves. If these words are used in a phrase, they are not highlighted in the search results (see example in the next section).

Multi-term search

Contract Express allows for search by several terms or phrases separated by a logical operator (AND / OR / NOT).
Term
 is a single word.
Phrase
 is a group of words surrounded by double quotes.
Multi-term Search results.
  • AND
     operator allows to search for documents containing
    all
     used terms or phrases.
  • OR
     operator allows to search for documents that contain
    at least one
     of the used terms or phrases. If you don’t use any operators between search words/ phrases, OR operator is used by default.
  • NOT
     operator allows to search for documents that
    don’t
     contain the used term or phrase.
You can group clauses using parentheses. For example, the following search
“Court order” AND (Warrantees OR Guarantees)
will return the documents with ‘court order’ and either ‘warranties’, or ‘guarantees’.

Wildcard and fuzzy search

Wildcard
 is a symbol used to replace or represent one or more characters. Contract Express supports single and multiple character wildcard searches within single terms (not within phrase queries).
The single character wildcard search looks for terms that match that with the single character replaced. To perform a single character wildcard search, use the
?
 symbol. For example, to search for "text" or "test" you can search for te?t.
The multiple character wildcard allows to replace several characters using
*
 symbol. In the example below, the search results will contain documents with all words started with “oblig” - obligation, obligatory, oblige etc.
note
You can use a * or ? symbol in the middle of the term, but you cannot use them as the first character of a search.
Fuzzy search
 returns results that are likely to be relevant when the search criteria are not exact. To do a fuzzy search use the tilde
~
 symbol at the end of a single word term. For example, to search for a term similar in spelling to "roam" use the fuzzy search roam~. This search will find terms like foam and roams.

Proximity search

Contract Express supports finding words within a specific distance away. To do a proximity search use the tilde
~
 symbol at the end of a phrase. For example, to search for "obligation" and "management" within 5 words of each other in a document use the search
“obligation management”~5
.

This article applies to:

  • Product: Contract Express