By Kate O’Neal
Recently at a meeting with a client, one of the users asked his primary engineer if he could help him out with some Outlook search tips. He wanted to be able search using Outlook wild cards to narrow down his search. We all know how crucial email is to our daily productivity, and simply searching with the search bar can sometimes be quite frustrating with the wide range of results we receive.
Say I need to find an email sent from my co-worker, fellow Client Manager Erin Kowtko. If I search my inbox simply for her name, I receive a wide range of results and the majority of them are not actually sent from Erin. Searching simply her name, the search function looks for emails containing both Erin and Kowtko, in no particular order. The easier way to find an email sent from Erin is to search From: “Erin Kowtko.” See the results below – all emails are sent by Erin.
There are a ton of ways to search not only your email, but other functions in Outlook, such as contacts, calendars, notes, and tasks. You can see a more in-depth list of examples here: Learn to narrow your search criteria for better searches in Outlook. Below are a few to get you started, pulled from the list in the link above:
The biggest tip to remember is if you use double quotation marks, the search function will look for the specific phrase within the quotation marks. If you want to search a combination of words in no particular order, do not use the quotation marks.
Happy searching!
Kate O’Neal
With multiple years’ experience working with clients in many industries, Kate brings her skills and positive attitude to Network 1’s team, clients and partners. She strives to provide the best service and solutions to her clients so they can achieve greatness through Worry-Free IT.
koneal@network1consulting.com or 404.997.7653
Network 1 Consulting is an 19-year-old, IT Support company in Atlanta, GA. We become – or augment – the IT department for law firms and medical practices. Our IT experts can fix computers – but what our clients value most are the industry-specific best practices we bring to their firms. This is especially important with technology, along with regulations and cyber threats, changing so rapidly. We take a proactive approach to helping our clients use technology to gain and keep their competitive advantage.
