Unless you’re a search ninja, you’re likely to only type in a search term in the Outlook search bar, and hope for the best. However, there are a number of other options you can use that are found in the Ribbon Bar. Here’s where to find them…
From the Home tab in Outlook, go clear over to the right side and click the Filter Email option. That will show a drop-down list of eight search options you can use to find stuff using more than just a keyword:
The predefined options are Unread, Has Attachments, This Week, Categorized, Flagged, Important, Sent To: Me or CC: Me, and View Items Expiring Soon. I’m going to click on the Has Attachments option to filter my email to only show me things that have attachments on them:
As you can see, I now have a list of all my emails that have attachments. You’ll also see the keyword hasattachments:yes in the search bar, which means you could use that along with other keywords to build some complex searches to narrow down your returned search to be only the items you’re looking for:
Not all of these may be of use to you, such as if you don’t use expiration dates a lot. But filtering by any of these options combined with a search term or two can greatly enhance your search skills.
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