@Lower Function

lekelleher

Forums

I have an IDEA Project to do on the @lower function, I'm new to IDEA and get what I have appended but I need to come up with a business use for the function, I deal with sorting Purchase Invoices, linking names with similar address.
Lee

Brian Element Sat, 09/24/2016 - 09:41

Hi Lee and welcome the site.

Well the @lower function will take everything in a field and change all letters in capital case to lower case.  In older versions of IDEA you would need the @lower or @upper functions when doing comparisons of fields with text.  So you would combine this function with the @Isin to look for matches.  Suppose you had a character field that you wanted to look for the word PO BOX, now the field could have it as PO Box, or po box or in many different formats, so you would use the @lower to standardize the field to do the search.  Your equation would be @Isin("po box", @lower(Address)), this would put everything in the address field into lowercase for the compasion with "po box".  Now IDEA added a function called @Isini that does this for you, so the @upper and @lower are hold overs from when you needed them for comparison.

You can also use them for formatting.  In Canada our postal codes are a mixture of letter and numbers, so if I wanted to standardize the postal code for a report I could use the @lower or @upper to make sure that all the charcters are either in upper or lower case.

I am not sure if this helps you out or not.  From your discription if you are linking names and addresses and using the @Isin function you would want to use the @lower so that you don't have to worry about upper and lower cases that don't match.

Brian

lekelleher Sun, 09/25/2016 - 06:24

Hi Brian,
Thanks for getting back to me, I am a tax auditor and I would be using IDEA for checking sales and purchases records, doing mark up exercises and checking that taxes are recorded correctly things like that.
Thanks again,
Lee-Ann

Sunder Gee Wed, 09/28/2016 - 11:15

 

If there is a computerized POS system verus and Electronic Cash Register, you may wish to consider using IDEA to analyse the POS data.

Steven Luciani Wed, 09/28/2016 - 13:59

Hi Lee,

For your project the @lower would be needed when joining two files based on character fields. Let's say you are in an organization where there isn't perfect integration between the general ledger and the AP system an in this cumbersome environment purchasing information is input manually into both the GL and AP. Let's say your link between the two systems is a purchase order number (POID) that is a combination of letters and numbers. For example P322sz. If this is input manually in each system there is a possibility that the inputter may use a variety of upper and lower case in each system. If you were conducting a test to see if all items in the AP system were also input into the GL saytem where the AP file is the primary file and the GL is the secondary file, and you were looking for records with no secondary match; you would need to ensure that your purchase order fields were the same letter case wise to rule out any false positives. So you would need to create a new field in your AP file using the equation @lower(POID)  and a new field in your GL using the same equation. Then you would do the match in the join using the new all lowercase fields you created. This would assure you that any PO not in the GL would be a PO that didn't get entered not just a PO where a letter was input in a different case in each of the systems.

Hope that helps.