One feature I’ve always missed in Studio is being able to filter by a source and target string at the same time. A fairly recent arrival on the SDL AppStore is Integrated Search Views, a plugin that lets you do just that, and more.
Almost two years ago I wrote a blog post comparing Studio and memoQ. I’ve updated it a couple of times since then to reflect the latest changes and features, but memoQ has always won hands down on its filtering options, with sorting, cascading and, more recently – following in Studio’s footsteps – regex strings to make it really comprehensive. Studio has just caught up. (* See comment at end of post)
It’s hard to keep up with all the apps that are published on the SDL OpenExchange. In fact, there are so many, I’d like to be able to keep track of them somehow – maybe under “Latest News” in the Studio Welcome view. One app that I happened to spot a few months ago is called Integrated Search Views, and bearing in mind that it has been downloaded just 89 times, this may well be the first time you’ve heard of it, which is why I’m writing this post today.
Search for a selected word
At its most basic, with Integrated Search Views you can select a word in a source segment in the Editor view, click Alt-F10 and see all instances of that word in a filtered view. With the dedicated window in view you can then search by source and/or target segment string. Double click any segment to jump to the same segment in the Editor.
(Click on images to enlarge them)
Search for two words in the same source and/or target segment
You can also search for instances of two different words in the same segment, to see how they collocate:
Or search for one word, and not the other:
If you don’t have a termbase, or don’t know how to set up forbidden terms, the “and not” operator is useful to check whether specific or forbidden terms have been used:
(Did you know it’s also easy to carry out these QA checks in Project settings under Verification>QA Checker 3.0>Word List or simply enter the terms in Regular Expressions, immediately below Word List?)
Tags
At last, you can search for segments that contain tags, or even a specific type of tag:
Options
Under options, you can match by case, regular expression or whole word.
Segment status
The “Filter” button lets you select the segment status, locked or unlocked segments, 100% or fuzzy matches, as well as date options. The “Context Type” box is a mystery because it seems to refer to document structure data, but I haven’t managed to get it to work. (Please let me know in a comment below if you have more success with it.)
Search across multiple files and projects
The app also works at a file and project level. In the Files or Projects view, click “Search in project” on the Add-ins or View tab. This calls up the search window. Then, perform a search across multiple files/projects to quickly find an instance of a word when you don’t know which file it’s in:
All in all, this is a great addition to Studio’s box of tricks.
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Great tool – thank you for posting this! So useful for me in my current project and really something I was missing.
Thank you for posting this, Emma. I visit the Open Exchange app store often but hadn’t seen this one, I’ll go download it right now!
SegmentSearcher 1.1 edition in the author’s website supports both SDL Trados Studio 2014 and 2015.
Thanks, Joe. I’ve just updated the blog post to clarify this.
Good to have this introduction to a useful plugin! But may I point out that you will find it mentioned and briefly described (and also, among others, the similar Bilingual Searcher, which does much of the same things in many files at once, outside Studio) in my manual, in the section “Find & replace and advanced management of segments”. 🙂
Also, the OpenExchange is now the SDL AppStore, with a totally revamped GUI. (A brief description of how to navigate in that GUI is given in http://tradosstudiomanual.com/?p=1253.)
I did search for this app in your manual before I wrote this post, Mats, but didn’t find it. Can you point me to a page no.?
Yes, the OpenExchange has indeed been totally revamped and modernised. I mentioned its new name – SDL AppStore – in my opening paragraph, and then referred to it as the OpenExchange later on. Not a very consistent approach, but I wanted to be sure readers knew what I was talking about.
I like the walk through the new interface that you linked to. Very useful!
My apologies for pointing out what was not an oversight. I should learn to read more carefully.
In the current (second) edition of the manual, this plugin is mentioned on p. 189 (and the section I referred to is on pp. 187-192).
Ah! I was trying to look it up in the 1st edition by mistake. Yes, I’ve now located it in the 2nd edition. Sorry about that.
One thing you mention in your manual is that searches are limited to the open document. Actually, one of the neat features in this app is the possibility of searching across a group of files in the Files view (or even projects in the Projects view). You can then double click any segment and it will open in the Editor window. Pretty cool!
I now realise the reason for my oversight: The presentation of the plugin on the download page only says “In an open document, select a phrase right-click and search for that phrase in the currently open document”. But as Emma says, you can search in projects or files. The trick — which you have to find out for yourself, it seems — is to go to the Add-ins ribbon and click on “Search in project”; then the corresponding search pane is opened and can be used for selected projects/files. This is interesting also because as far as I know, it is the only plugin which is activated in this way (but I may be wrong — I haven’t installed all available plugins).
Indeed, to display the search window in the Files or Projects views, you need to go to the Add-ins or View tab and click “Search in project”. I’ll add this to my post. Thanks Mats.
Addition to the comment below (or above, as the case may be): You only need to go to the Add-ins ribbon if (a) you want to search in several projects or files at once and (b) you haven’t already made a search and thus have the Integrated Search Views pane open. In Emma’s example above, the pane is already there.
Not everybody has the manual and so this post will have been useful for a lot of people anyway. It is a funny coincidence that just this weekend I ordered the manual – though I have been working with Trados since version 2009 – and I already found some useful things, but who knows when I would have read about the app… I write this because I didn’t really understand the point of your comment. One indication does not exclude the other, and as I said, not everybody uses your manual (perhaps also because it is quite expensive). I thank you both for all the useful ideas 🙂
Of course I know that not everybody has the manual (in fact, I am sure that most readers of Emmas’ excellent blog don’t) — this was just my way of getting some (free) PR for it. 🙂
🙂
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What a great little app., Emma, thanks for finding it and telling us about it! Particularly keen on the project / multi file level search. Do wish Trados filtering could have a makeover, surely some easy wins in there!
Nice improvement, but as you say, strange it’s only been downloaded a hundred or so times. You still don’t seem to be able to sort segments alphabetically though. I would really miss that. Déjà Vu has been able to filter and sort on source, target and segment status (fuzzy match, propagated, empty, etc.) and sort alphabetically ever since the very first versions in the 1990s. Studio seems to be catching up in some areas but I would still miss DV’s flexibility in filtering and sorting across projects containing hundreds of files. I have several ongoing projects and each time I receive a new file or new files, I just add it or them to the existing project file. It’s then much easier to view and work on segments with overlapping content dating back over a considerable period of time.
Hi Dave, yes, Déjá Vu still has many more filtering options.
I think the reason for so few downloads is that many users don’t know the AppStore exists. But those same users aren’t even making use of the filtering options that come in the Studio product itself. It’s amazing how many people have never even filtered by match type or source word. For me, filtering is a basic feature that I use dozens of times a day.
And, like you, I also add new files to existing projects (I have one project for each client), so searching across all files is a useful new option at a project level, without even having to open those files.