Having just blogged about my filing system for email, I’m considering changing it completely. I have spent a few minutes ‘playing’ with Outlook 2007’s Instant Search feature – it rocks !!
The technical bit are that you must have some of the Windows Search modules installed (this comes as standard Vista, so ‘check’) and you have to give a bit of time to index your mailbox if you have a bunch of stuff in there already (been running Outlook 2007 for a couple of weeks now, so ‘check’)
It is basically a background task that runs in Outlook and crawl through your mail, contacts, nos, tasks and calendar items, indexing them as it goes. When it’s done the initial indexing then it reverts to just indexing things as they are received (or sent) or when edited.
To use it is a simple case of typing into the every present search box and (if configured to) it will bring back results as you type – the more you type the more accurate the results are.
The default behaviour is to just search the inbox (or in fact whatever folder you have currently selected).
As you can see the results also have the search terms highlighted (a la Google).
The search is very quick (a couple of seconds gets results back on my Acer dual core laptop).
Clicking on the double down pointing chevrons on the right hand side exposes the Advanced Find options
Here you can choose from any of 23 criteria including From, To, Body, Received, Sent, In Folder etc. You can also ad criteria from any custom forms you have loaded. Clicking the ‘Add Criteria’ button gives a dropdown list with all the criteria available for selecting. When you select a new criteria it is added to the orange area.
However ‘Search All Outlook Items’ is where it’s at. This searches across all folders in your mailbox – tasks, contacts, calendar, everything (including all subfolders, OST files and PST files). The results seem to be just as quick and it gives the additional information in the results of which folder it is in.
SO, how does this relate to me changing my email filing ‘system’ – well, as this search feature is soooo… good, I reckon I could now achieve the same by simply dumping all email into a ‘Reference’ folder and if / when I need something just using this improved search feature.