Advanced PowerSchool Searching tip #1: The Wildcard (@)

Have you ever wanted to know all the students that live on a certain street or you have a student with a last name you haven’t a clue how to spell. Don’t go crazy trying to find a sticky note you had three weeks ago, use the wildcard. The wildcard is a placeholder for all the things we don’t know. PowerSchool uses the symbol @ as the wildcard.Let’s say you want to know all the kids that live on Pleasantville Lane, but obviously the house numbers are different for each student. Use the wildcard. Normally to perform this search for a single student we would type “street=111 Pleasantville Lane”. To get the all the houses on Pleasantville Lane we will search using “street=@Pleasantville Lane instead we would get all the houses.

The search results will be a list of students that live at 111 Pleasantville Lane, 123 Pleasantville Lane, 555 Pleasantville Lane, etc. It looks like we have gotten all the students that live on Pleasantville Lane, but what about the apartments? 987 Pleasantville Lane Apt 3B is not on this list. What happened? PowerSchool will only do what we tell. We asked for any address that ended in Pleasantville Lane.   987 Pleasantville Lane Apt 3B ends in “Apt 3B” so this student is not listed. No problem, we use two wildcards, one at the beginning and one at the end of the last name. Our new search is “street=­@Pleasantville Lane@”.

Our new search will get the addresses that contain Pleasantville Lane anywhere in the address. We now have what we want. Our new list of students will include those that live at 111 Pleasantville Lane as well as 987 Pleasantville Lane Apt 3B. This method can be extended in many different ways, from names to course numbers to allergies (“allergies=@peanut@”).

Finally, wildcards can be placed in any position including in the middle. For example you would like all the students taking a Math class second semester. You could use the “*enrolled_in=MA@2” and this would bring up a list of all students enrolled in a any second semester math class. (Algebra, Geometry, Math B, etc)

Don’t be afraid of Wildcards. Try them. They will save you time.