Small City Law Firm Tech

I’m not a software designer, so I can’t begin to understand why they do some of the things they do.  This is one of them… Despite the design, the feature itself is very, very useful.

Outlook, with its default Ribbon install looks like this (assuming no add-ins):

No Search Tab (hold on to that thought – we’re going to come back to it in a later post)

But, as soon as you click on the ‘Search’ box, located above the Message list columns:

The ‘Search Tools’ Ribbon pops into view:

If you were intent only on typing in the Search box, you might not notice this addition to the Ribbon, and that would be a very sad thing indeed, because the Search Tools are an incredibly powerful way to build a search to quickly find the items you are looking for.  Why couldn’t it just be there on the Ribbon all the time?

Using Search Tools, you can easily and quickly ‘build’ a search that becomes more and more defined as you add to your query.  In the example below, I’ll start by searching for all email sent ‘From’ the account vmanning@gmail.com (because I regularly send emails from my Gmail account to my work account), in ‘All Subfolders’ (of Inbox).  As I further define the search, you’ll see how the Search Tool operates.

I’ve turned on the ‘In folder’ column in the search results list (a future post will show how to customize those settings), so you can see that the search quickly found the email that I sent to my work account from my Gmail account, most of which is in my Inbox, but some of which is in other subfolders.

Next, I’m going to refine the search further, because I’m looking for something that came in the last month, with an attachment.

And there’s the email I was looking for.  Now I just double-click to open.

When I’m finished, I can just click on the ‘Close Search’ button to return to my Inbox

You have a lot of choice in Search Tools and the best way to learn it is to play with it a bit.  Click through the various options, building your searches and taking a look at the results to see what you get.  If you click ‘All Mail Items’ for example, your search won’t just be limited to, say, your Inbox and its subfolders, but will be expanded to every folder in your Mailbox. Or, drop down the ‘More’ button and see if some of those additional search items will get you what you’re looking for.

Or, drop down ‘Recent Searches’ and choose from the list, if it’s a search you’ve done before and would like to do again:

Go ahead and play!  (Don’t forget about setting up permanent Search folders, as described in the Trifecta post)