Does the Lookup tool search all values in a field?

[jennk20]

I'm using the Excel Alma Lookup tool on an existing Analytics report I run that gives me a list of ISBNs delimited by semi-colons in a single cell. When I run the Lookup tool, I am getting results, but I'm just wondering if it is only searching for the first ISBN in the cell or if it searches all ISBNs listed in the cell? Thanks!

[tventimi]

Hello,

That's a great question - I just ran some experiments, and it looks like it is only searching for only first ISBN (actually, searching for both the 10 and 13-digit versions of it). However, this is really a bug, since by design it should be able to accept a list of search keys separated by the vertical bar and retrieve results for any of them. We will work on fixing this in an upcoming version. And having the semicolon as a delimiter is a good idea too, since this is the delimiter in Alma's own reports. Thanks for pointing this out!

Tom Ventimiglia
Princeton University Library

[jennk20]

Awesome! Thank you so much, Tom! This tool is a lifesaver, by the way. Great work!

[tventimi]

I just updated the beta version (v1.4.0) of the plugin so that it can search for multiple ISBNs, ISSNs, or OCLC Nos if these are contained in a single cell and separated by "|" or ";". The beta release contains other features that allow multi-index searching, so if you still have a need for this feature, you can download this version and read the documentation here:

https://github.com/pulibrary/ExcelAlmaLookup?tab=readme-ov-file#beta-version-v140-with-multi-index-searching

If you end up trying this out, please let us know if it works for you! Thanks again for your interest and for bringing up this issue.

Tom

[tventimi]

Just wanted to let you know that the beta version I referenced before has now been officially released (v1.4.0), and can be downloaded from the main page. Now, if a search field contains a list of ISBNs (or other identifiers) separated by the vertical bar or semicolon characters, all of them will be included in the search. Let me know if you run into any other issues. And thanks for the helpful feedback!

Tom

[jennk20]

Awesome! Thank you very much!