Outlook - Advanced Find 3rd Jan 2006
To start the year we are going to look at searching for items in Outlook, so that you can sweep out all your old emails, appointments and tasks that are clogging-up your system and start the New Year with a tidy set-up.
FIND
Outlook's normal Find (Tools - Find), is for looking for certain items such as an email or appointment, and it uses the text content to locate it. When you give the command the Find bar appears on the screen, and you can enter the text you are looking for and the folder you want to search.
This is great when you are looking for that message you received a couple of weeks ago but is not so good when you want to find all the messages that are more than a year old.
FINDING ALL ITEMS OVER A YEAR OLD
Using Advanced Find allows you to specify a wider variety of criteria to identify the items you are looking for.
1. Give the command Tools - Find - Advanced Find.
2. A dialog box appears. Near the top it will say Look For: Messages and the name of the folder you are currently in. (If you were in your calendar when you started this it will be looking for Appointments and Meetings in the Calendar.)
3. Change the Look For: to "Any type of Outlook item".
4. Further down you can specify specific words, senders (From), and recipients (Sent To) you are trying to find. Leave these blank because we are only interested in the date of the item this time. Similarly, we don't want to take advantage of any of the options on the More Choices tab.
5. Click the tab, Advanced, where you can create very specific criteria for your search.
6. Click the Field button, and choose All Mail Fields followed by Modified. This sets the search to look for the date the item was last changed.
7. In the Condition box choose "on or before" and then in the Value box put 31/12/04.
8. Click Add to List. The list above should now have a line saying "Modified on or before 31/12/04". Use the Remove button if you want to change the date or make other changes to the line.
9. Click Find Now, and the search results will be shown at the bottom of the dialog box.
10. You'll probably not want to change your Contacts, so sort the list by the folder they are in by clicking the In Folder button at the top of the column.
11. You can then select individual items or blocks of items, right-click them and give the command to Delete (or Move them to an Archive folder) as required.
USING ADVANCED FIND ON PERSONAL FOLDERS
Normally Find and Advanced Find search your Mailbox folders. If you want to look in a set of Personal Folders use the following procedure:
1. Start Advanced Find in the usual way.
2. Click the Browse button to see a list of your Information Stores.
3. Remove the existing tick from your Mailbox and tick which set of Personal Folders you want to search instead.
4. Make sure the option to Search Subfolders in the bottom-left is ticked too.
5. Click OK.
6. Check your search criteria and the click Find Now to run the search.
A NOTE ON AUTOARCHIVE
Some of you may use AutoArchive to clean out old items. That's great, but think, if Autoarchive is set to move the old items, where do they go and do you want to keep them forever?