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The Microsoft Outlook E-Mail and Fax Guide
Last Updated 7/27/2009 2:10:28 PM
Chapter 14: Finding Items and Managing Folders in Outlook
This chapter explores message and folder procedures in Outlook, including finding items, creating and using archives, and keeping folders to a manageable size.
In Chapter 9, we got acquainted with Outlook’s hierarchy of folders and subfolders. This chapter adds other message and folder procedures to explore as you use Outlook more extensively. These procedures include
- finding items
- creating and using archives
- keeping folders to a manageable size
FINDING ITEMS
You don’t use e-mail long before the messages start piling up. Either you don’t get around to reading them all, or you set some aside for later actions. Eventually, you want to find a message you received (or sent) days ago, but you might not remember exactly when.
To locate such an item, you can browse the messages or use the Find tool. The examples in this chapter focus on e-mail messages, but most of these techniques also apply to Contacts and other Outlook items.
Browsing Items
If you know the recipient of the message you’re trying to find, the subject, or the date it was sent or received — and you know which folder it’s in — you may be able to find the message fastest simply by looking through the messages in that folder. Click on a column heading to quickly sort the items and make it easy to zero in on the one you need.
For example, if you’re looking for a message sent to Jim Cundiff, switch to the Sent Items folder. Normally, this folder is sorted by the date items were sent, with the most recent at the top. Click on the To column heading to sort the items by recipient, in alphabetical order. You can see this in Figure 14.1, where the To column heading has an arrowhead on it to show that it’s sorted in alphabetical order.
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Special Note: If you don’t see the To column (or any other column you want to sort by), add it by choosing View, Show Fields or View, Field Chooser. |
You could, of course, just scroll through the list of items at this point. But there’s a faster method"> Type the first few letters of the name of the recipient. Outlook jumps to the first message sent to that person. Depending on the number of items in the folder, this may take a few seconds or it may occur immediately.
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Special Note: If the view allows you to edit records in the view, then any typing will go into the current item, rather than taking you to the item you are searching for. To disable in-cell editing, choose View, Format View, and clear the “Allow in-cell editing” box. |
This technique works in any folder. To sum up, first sort by the column you want to search in, then type the first few letters of the name or subject you’re searching for.
Using the Find Tools
Browsing messages, as described above, is practical only if you know which folder is likely to contain the item and the folder contains a relatively small number of items. Once folders grow to contain hundreds of messages and other items, browsing may be less efficient than the Find tools — two quick tools and a detailed Find dialog box — included with Outlook.
Using the Quick Find Tools
The two speedy Find tools work only in message folders. They allow you to select a message, then search for other messages like it.
To search for other messages about the same topic, right-click on a message or choose Tools, then choose Find All, Related Messages (see Figure 14.2). Outlook automatically searches the current folder for other messages similar to the one you selected, looking for a matching Conversation field. This may less useful in practice than it sounds, because most messages that you receive from the Internet will have a blank Conversation field. The Conversation field is used only on messages on Exchange Server and those sent via the Internet with rich-text formatting.
To search for other messages from the same sender, right-click on a message or choose Tools, then choose Find All, Messages from Sender. Outlook automatically searches the current folder for other messages sent by the same person as the message you selected. Because it always searches for the sender, not the recipient, the quick Find All tool is effective only in the Inbox and other folders where you move incoming items.
These Find tools display the Find dialog box, which we explore in the next section, then run their searches immediately. To stop the search, click the Stop button. Once the search halts, you can switch to the Advanced tab on the Find dialog box to change the criteria (see “Using Advanced Find Conditions” later in this chapter). You might also want to broaden the search to more folders.
Working with the Find Tool
To use the full Find tool, click Tools, Find Items to display the Find dialog box shown in Figure 14.3.
First, under “Look for” at the top of the dialog box, choose the type of item you want to search for. If you choose Messages, the first tab in the Find dialog box is Messages and shows the most common fields used to search messages. You can also choose to search for other types of Outlook items or even for files on your system.
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Special Note: The Outlook Find tools do not work at all with Microsoft Mail Shared Folders. |
Second, specify where you want to search. By default, the Find tool starts its search in the current folder. If that folder is in a Personal Folders file or Exchange Server mailbox, it also searches all subfolders. To search other folders or turn off subfolder searching, click the Browse button. In the Select Folder(s) dialog box (Figure 14.4), select the folder or folders where you want to search.
You can search multiple folders only from the same set of private folders — that is, from the same set of Personal Folders or Exchange Server mailbox. In Exchange Server Public Folders, you can search just one folder at a time; subfolders cannot be included in a search of public folders.
Third, enter what you want to search for. The first tab includes fields commonly used to search for the type of item you’ve chosen. On the second tab, More Choices (Figure 14.5), are more criteria that can be used to narrow your search. We look at the Advanced tab in the next section.
The conditions in the Find tool work just like those for filters. See “Applying Filters” in Chapter 9 for more details. Remember that if you set multiple conditions, a message must meet all of them to be considered a match for the search.
Once you’ve specified the type of items you want to search for, the folders to search, and the search criteria, click Find Now to begin searching. The Find dialog box expands to show the search results at the bottom (Figure 14.6). You can let the search go through all folders or click Stop once you see the particular item you were looking for.
For Messages, the Find dialog box display always defaults to the Messages view, as shown in Figure 14.6. You can choose View, Current View to use any of these views:
- Messages
- Messages with AutoPreview
- By Conversation Topic
- By Sender
- Sent To
For Contacts, these are the view choices:
- Phone List
- By Category
- By Company
- By Location
Even though they use the same names as the views you can modify for different folders, the Find dialog box views are built into Outlook and cannot be changed. However, you can click on any of the column headings to sort the search results differently or use the Sort and Group By tools from the View menu. You also can add other fields by choosing View, then Show Fields or Field Chooser. See “Rearranging Fields” in Chapter 9 if you need a refresher on how to use these tools to change the fields displayed. Under “Customizing the Find Display” at the end of the chapter, you can find information about how to reuse that view.
To clear the Find dialog box so that you can begin a new search, just click New Search.
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