I'm going to give you a few tips so that you can start searching for your emails a little bit better. Now we're just going to use a test account in this scenario. So none of these emails and people that you see in my inbox are real. So don't go trying to message them. Now, when we want to search in our inbox, we have a search bar at the top.
Now you can either click your mouse up there to activate search or if you're working in an email, you can press Alt Q and that's going to jump your cursor up to that search bar. Now we have some suggested searches underneath. I can't say I find these particularly useful, but what I do find useful is this search ribbon underneath, because this is going to really help us refine our search results.
Now, the first thing to point out here is that you need to define the scope of your search. And the scope just means where you are searching. Now, notice to the left it says Current Mailbox. Now, because I'm clicked on Inbox, it's going to search the inbox and any subfolders that I have underneath. I could change this to something else, so I could search in the subfolders, or I could search across all mailboxes.
So if you have multiple email accounts attached to Outlook like I do here, you can type in a search term and it will search across the entire lot. And then the final one at the bottom is the broadest search that you can do in Outlook. This is going to search across absolutely everything. So it will search in your inbox, it will search in your calendar, and it will also search in your contacts.
Just be aware that if you are using that one, it can take a little bit longer simply because it's having to go through a lot more information. So the first thing is to make sure that you have your scope set correctly. A lot of the time, if you can't find something, it might be because you're just not searching in the correct place.
So I'm going to keep mine on current mailbox, which means I'm searching in my inbox. Now, if I click up here, let's type in a search term. I'm going to type in the word man. Now, when I hit enter, it's going to return all the results that it finds, and it finds one. Now, it's found this because I have the word manual in here.
So, when you type in man, it's going to search for any email that contains the word man in uppercase or lowercase. It would find emails that contain the word Many. It would find emails that contain the word manual. But what it won't find are emails that contain the word Superman or Snowman or Fireman.
And that is because, and this is a really important point, Outlook uses prefix searching. So it will search for anything that starts with man, but it's not going to search for anything that ends with man. Now, I know that I have an email in here that has the word snowman in it, and it hasn't picked it up because of this prefix search.
So if I wanted to find that email, I would have to type in the word snowman and hit enter. And you can see it's now finding that email thread, and there are three emails that contain the word snowman. But it's not returning the email that contained the word manual. So just be aware of that. Now I'm going to clear my search.
So let's say that I'm looking for a specific email from Jennifer Green. Notice underneath we have all of these different refine options. So I'm going to click on from check out what happens in the search bar at the top. And I can type in the name, Jennifer. Green. Hit enter to run that search, and it's going to bring back all of those search results.
What about if I want to refine this a little bit further? Well, I can! So maybe the email that I'm looking for has an attachment. I can click on Has Attachments, and now I've managed to zero in in just a couple of clicks on exactly the email that I'm looking for. And check out what we have up in the search bar.
You can see it's kind of building its search string up here. So we have from colon Jennifer Green in quotation marks. That means it's going to search for the exact phrase Jennifer Green, not just Jennifer and Green. And it says has attachments. Yes. Let's click the cross. Now, you can use these refine tools to really zero in on what you're looking for.
So if you've tagged your emails with categories, you can search by category. Nice and straightforward. You can search for flagged emails. If I click this, it's going to show anything that I have flagged. You can search for emails that have been marked as important or emails that have been sent, maybe directly to you.
You're the only one in the to field. And you can search for emails that are unread.
And if you wanted to, you can toggle this on to include your deleted items folder as well. Click it again to toggle it off. Now, everything we've done here is referred to as instant search. And did you know that you can also use things like logical operators in this search area as well?
So if I click on the cross, I could type in search for all males that contain the word Jennifer and green and hit enter. So the email has to contain both of these in order to return a result. I could change this to OR, so it's going to search for emails that contain Jennifer OR green. And remember, if you are searching for a specific phrase, it needs to go in quote marks if there is more than one word.
So, let's say I'm looking for an email about Excel webinars. I'm going to put that in quote marks. Here enter, and you can see it returns it. Now, if I don't use quote marks just here, it will return any emails that contain the word excel or the word webinars. So if I'm looking for a very specific phrase and I only want to find emails that contain that phrase, I need to put them in the quote marks.
So that is basically your instant search. The most important takeaways there are, make sure you have your scope set correctly, and then use your refinement options in order to find what you're looking for. Now we also have an advanced search. So if we click back up in the search bar, you're going to find advanced search underneath this little drop down arrow.
As soon as I click on that, it opens up this pane where we basically have a lot of the things that we have on the ribbon, but we have them all in one go. So instead of just clicking things one at a time to refine our search, we can just type in all of our criteria, click search, and it will do it all in one go.
That's the only real difference. So again, we can define our scope at the top here. We can define if we're looking for emails with attachments or not. We can define who it's from, specific text in the body. When it was received, we have start date and end date fields. The subject, who it was to, we can complete all of these fields.
And then at the bottom, we have add more options. So if you want to add more fields to that advanced search, for example, maybe I want to be able to search by the BCC line, I'm going to click on OK. I'm going to apply it. And now you can see that we have BCC just here. So let's say that I'm looking for an email from Jennifer Green, where the body contains the word tacos, making me hungry.
Let's click on search and you can see there it is. She's asking me if I'm in the mood for tacos. And my response to that is always. And that is pretty much it with Outlook search. It is super simple to use, and if you use it correctly, it's actually really easy to find everything that you need.
