I'd like to use Advanced Find to find everyone in my contacts who has a birthday coming up within the next three months. When I create the rule I think should work, it finds all birthdays, not just the upcoming ones.
A1:
Recurring appointments are difficult to filter because Outlook sees them as active all the time, not just once a year. If you use recurrence patterns and categories, you can perform this search using two rules, which you'll need to update as the months change:
Categories contains Birthday
Reoccurrence pattern contains June or July or August
You can use these criteria in a custom view filter; in fact, it might be better used as a custom view instead of Advanced Find.
Q2:
I like the new Outlook 2003 interface, but I am still trying to figure out how to create a search for all overdue task items.
A2:
My favorite Outlook feature will handle this for you. Because it's a task item, a custom view might work best:
Select the Tasks folder and open the Define Views dialog using V iew, A rrange By, Current V iew, D efine Views. Select New, Table view and choose All Task Folders. Select OK and the Customize View dialog opens.
Select Fi l ter to open the Filter dialog.
On the Advanced tab, select F i eld, Frequently-Used Fields, Due By. The Use C ondition equals on or before and Value equals today .
To restrict it to tasks not finished, select Complete from the All Task fields menu; the C ondition is equals and the Val u e is No . Choose A d d to List.
Your view is fished. Use the Views toolbar to switch between this and other views on your folder.