Searching for Information

If you're using Outlook to store any decent amount of information, you'll eventually want to find some of the information you've carefully filed away. If you organize all of your Outlook information meticulously, you might not have any problem quickly navigating to the proper folder and locating the item in question. However, if you're like most people, you have a lot of your information organized and some of your information simply uncategorized in your inbox.

You can, of course, simply sort a folder view by subject and try to locate your information that way. The only problem with that method is that the subject of the email message might not be very helpful. Some people email the way they talk on the phone. They create one email message and discuss ten or twelve different topics in the same message. Simply searching by subject might not be enough.

Alternatively, you can search by sender. However, even that might not supply enough information to quickly find an item. If you're searching for an email message from your boss, you might have to wade through 50 or 100 messages before you find the right one.

Outlook provides several methods to search for information. You can use QuickFind, Simple Find, Advanced Find, and Outlook 2003's new feature: Search Folders.