Drives Service & Support

Knowledgebase Tutorial

Searching

Knowing how to search is the most important part of the Knowledgebase. The knowledgebase offers several different ways to search.

• Phrases - The most basic keyword search. This will search out documents that include the words typed in the search text box. As long as one of your words is present, this will present the document with that word in it.
• Similar Phrases - This is a fuzzy logic search. Similar phrases will take phrases that are like what was typed in the search text box and return those results. This type of search is not an exact type search, but is good if you are not sure exactly what you are looking for.
• Exact Search - This will return documents with what was typed in the text search box exactly. If you typed in "Allen Bradley Drives", it will bring back documents with that exact phrase ONLY.
• Complex Expression - This allows you to search with wildcards. A wildcard is either an * or a ~. An Asterisk used after a word or part of a word will bring back all things with that initial part, and then anything afterward. i.e. searching for faults that begin with OVER would be "OVER*", which would bring back results like OverVoltage, and OverCurrent. A tilde (~) used before a word will do a synonym search. "~Over" would bring back synonyms in documents such as Above, Through, Ended, Terminated, etc.
• Answer ID - If you know the specific answer ID, then you can use this to search for the specific answer ID of the document. i.e. "35800"
• Previous TN# - If you know the previous Knowledgebase document ID, you can type that in, and it will bring back that document from the previous Knowledgebase. i.e. G41439660

Forming a Search

Let's form an example search. We will look for Recommendations of running a PowerFlex drive on Ungrounded Distribution Systems.

We know its an AC Drive. So we can start by using the product drop down to narrow our results to a product category. There is a sub box underneath the Product box that will allow you to narrow your search results even further. For this search, we can select "Drives and Motors" from the product box, and "AC Drives" from the subproduct box.

You can use the Category search to narrow your results to a type of document. Some areas use these while other do not. Drives and Motor do not use categories, and if you are not sure, then leave this set to "all".

In the search text box, type in some keywords. Lets try "PowerFlex Ungrounded". Leave the Search by set to Phrases. Hit the search button. The results will show up below.

You can see that the top document in the search is what we were looking for! You can then click on the Summary of the document, and it will display the document itself.

If you were looking for this document, and knew that is was previously published in the old Knowledgebase as document number A17435518, you can do a search to go directly to that document. You would type in that document number in the search text, and then change the "search by" drop down to "Previous TN#". This will bring back that document only, since it was the only document that had that previous Knowledgebase number.

You can also search by the new Answer ID. If you talked with an Engineer, and they told you to look up Answer ID 22482 for assistance in using your PowerFlex drive on an ungrounded distribution system, you can look it up by using Answer ID option in the "search by" drop down. In the search text box, type in "22482", and click the "search by" drop down, and change it to "Answer ID". Then hit search.

There are other ways to search to bring back results you are looking for. I have covered the most popular options. You can now go give it a try yourself!