When you enter text data in a criterion must enclose the quotation marks?

When entering text data in a criterion, it is not always necessary to enclose the text in quotation marks. However, there are certain scenarios where adding quotation marks is crucial to ensure accuracy and avoid confusion. Here's when you should use quotation marks:

1. For Literal Text Searches: When you want to find exact matches for specific text, you must enclose the text in quotation marks. This is particularly important when searching for phrases or names that should appear in the exact sequence specified. For instance, if you want to find records containing the phrase "Customer Service Department," you should use quotation marks to ensure that the system will only return results where that exact phrase appears.

2. With Wildcards: When using wildcard characters (* and ?) to represent one or more characters in your search, you need to enclose the entire search string, including the wildcards, in quotation marks. This helps the system recognize the wildcard characters and apply them correctly during the search. For example, if you want to find all customer names starting with "Jo," you should search for "*Jo*."

3. For Numeric Values Treated as Text: In certain cases, numeric values stored as text instead of numbers may require quotation marks. For example, if you have a column containing customer IDs that are numeric values stored as text, you must enclose the values in quotation marks when searching for specific IDs. This ensures that the system treats the values as text rather than numbers, preventing any issues with numerical comparisons.

4. Avoiding Syntax Conflicts: When your criteria involve operators or functions that use special characters, such as <, >, or =, you might need to enclose your text data in quotation marks to avoid conflicts with the syntax. By doing this, you ensure that the system interprets the data as a literal value rather than a part of the operator or function.

On the other hand, you don't need quotation marks when searching for numbers, dates, or boolean values, as these data types are handled differently by the system.

Remember, adding quotation marks where not required won't cause errors but may affect the efficiency of the search. Using quotation marks judiciously helps ensure precise and accurate results when working with text data in your criteria.