Small City Law Firm Tech

Yesterday, I introduced the idea of organizing your Mailbox by using the following approaches to viewing your email:

• Search Folders
• Follow-up flags
• Favourite Folders

Today’s tips will touch on the first in the list: Search Folders.

First the ‘Why’ of Search Folders

Why? Because that’s the easiest  part (not that the ‘how’ is difficult, it’s not): How would you like Outlook to always be on the search for certain emails – with you just telling it one time that you wanted to be able to easily and quickly view all the emails that satisfied those search terms?  That’s what Outlook Search Folders can do for you.  I touched on Outlook Search Folders here: When your Outlook Mailbox needs to go on a crash diet - How to slim it down quickly where I demonstrated how to use a built-in Search Folder to quickly find all the really large email in your Mailbox.  But Search Folders can do so much more for you if you give them the chance to!  Search Folders are a sorely underused feature of Outlook.  I hope, by the time you finish reading this post and playing a little with the Search Folders feature, you see just how much they can help you increase the ease of viewing your email.  And because you set them up once, they access them frequently, they take advantage of that great ‘bang for your buck’ use of software, where you make it work for you, rather than the other way ‘round.

An illustration of what I mean: I know which side my bread is buttered on J , so I have a set up a Search Folder for all my email received from and sent to our Managing Partner.  A simple click on this Search Folder shows me exactly what’s come in from him and what I’ve sent to him, and filters out all other email from my view – I see just those important emails and none other, when I’m viewing this Search Folder.  I can quickly view and find whatever I’m looking for, including something that might have come in among an avalanche of other email received when away from my desk for a few hours..

The Search Folder is always up-to-date, because this is one of the really nice aspects of Outlook Search Folders:  They are always ‘on’ – always searching, without you taking any further steps to update the search you click on a Search Folder to view the search results and those results are current – so I’m always on top of those Managing Partner emails.

That’s just one example of a Search Folder – there are so many more ways to use the Search Folder function.  As part of this series of tips, I’ll show you how to create a Search Folder for emails you’ve marked for Follow-up, so you can easily filter out those emails from the remainder in your Mailbox, just by clicking on the Search Folder for Follow-ups.

Now the ‘How’ of Search Folder for Follow Up:

In Outlook’s Navigation Pane, scroll down until you see ‘Search Folders’.  The ‘Search Folders’ folder is built into the program.  It might be empty, or it might have a couple of default Search Folders already built into it.  These instructions assume that you don’t already have a default Search Folder for Follow-ups.  If you do, then leave that Search Folder alone for now, and play with setting up a different Search Folder.

·         Click on ‘Search Folders’

·         Click on the pop-up ‘New Search Folder’

You will then see the ‘New Search Folder’, with its default search options.  Luckily, for this Tip, we’ll get to use one of the built-in search folder options, making it extremely easy to set up this Search Folder (In a later tip, I’ll dig further into Search Folders, showing you just what they are capable of).

In the ‘New Search Folder’ box:

·         Click on ‘Mail flagged for follow-up’

·         Click ‘OK’

The New Search Folder box will close.

Now, go back and look in Outlook’s Navigation Pane, and you’ll see a new Search Folder, titled ‘For Follow-up’.  This Search Folder will contain pointers to all email in your Mailbox that you’ve marked for Follow-up – go ahead and click on the new Search Folder ‘For Follow Up’.  If you haven’t marked any email for follow-up, the Search Folder will be empty for now.  If you see email pointed to in this Search Folder, but you aren’t sure how it got there – you’ve just inadvertently marked an email for follow-up, and that’s why you’re seeing it in this folder – it’s ok to just leave it alone for now.  (Tomorrow’s tip will show you how to mark email for follow-up (and how to unmark it – and if you thought today’s tip was easy – you’ll be happy to know tomorrow’s tip is even easier). 

When the Search Folder ‘For Follow Up’ is clicked on, Outlook will display only email that has been marked for ‘Follow up’, no matter where it resides in the Mailbox, and it will filter all other email out of the view:

You can see from the screenshot that the list of emails shows only those flagged for follow up (red flag) and shows the ‘real’ location of the email (in this example, all are in the Inbox).  The screenshot below shows the Inbox itself, which contains a view of only the first 2 of the flagged emails, with the remainder of the flagged emails way down the list, out of view:

Outlook Search Folders make it dead easy to view only what you want to view - in this case email flagged for Follow Up - and hide all other email, until you once again want to see other emails.

Some important notes about Search Folders:  Outlook Search Folders are both the same and different from Windows Explorer searches in these ways:

Same:

When you search in Windows Explorer, Explorer returns a list of results that satisfies your search request.  Say you’re searching for all files that have the extension ‘.jpg’ (pictures) in any folder on your computer.  When the search completes, you’ll be presented with a list of files that satisfy the search no matter which folder they reside in on your computer.  The search results ‘point’ to the location of the file on the computer, but the files themselves aren’t ‘moved’ or ‘copied’ into the search results list. The search doesn’t take any real action on the files, it just ‘points’ to the files that meet the search criteria.  This is important for 2 reasons:

1.      When you ‘close’ or ‘end’ your search, by closing the search window in Windows Explorer, the files remain wherever they were on your computer.  Closing the search doesn’t ‘delete’ the files in the search results; it just ends the search itself.  The same is true of Outlook Search Folders – if you delete the Search Folder, because you don’t want the search to take place any longer, the emails pointed to in the folder are **not** deleted.  They remain wherever they were in your Mailbox.  You can easily delete an Outlook Search Folder by right-clicking on it and then clicking on ‘Delete Folder’:

This is confirmed when you click on ‘Delete Folder’, with the below message confirming that the items contained in the Search Folder will **not** be deleted.

Any emails you’ve marked for Follow-up, that were showing in the ‘For Follow-up’ Search Folder will remain in your Mailbox, where they originally located.

2.      If you delete a file in the search results list in Windows Explorer, the file **is** deleted from its original location on your computer.  The file goes to your Trash.  The same is true when deleting an email from an Outlook Search Folder – if you delete an email from a search results list in an Outlook Search Folder, the email will go to your Deleted Items folder (your search will likely pick it up again, because it will also likely be searching the Deleted Items folder – you’ll just see the location change.  But if you delete the email once more from the Search Folder, then it’s really gone).

Different:

Searching in Windows Explorer is static, in the sense that once you hit ‘Search’, any new files created that would otherwise satisfy the search *after* the search runs will not be caught by the search, unless you run the search from scratch once again.  Outlook Search Folders are *always* searching.  Once the Search Folder is created, it is always waiting for a new email that satisfies the search terms – the Search Folder is always up-to-date with pointers to every email in your Mailbox that satisfies the search terms.   When you click on the search folder, it will automatically refresh the search: That’s the magic of Outlook Search Folders and what makes them so useful.

If you haven’t already, go ahead and create that Search Folder for email marked ‘For Follow Up’ (and if you’re feeling adventurous, go ahead and think about some other Search Folders that might help you organize your  email and take a stab at creating them – you can always delete Search Folder if the search results turns out to not be what you were hoping)

Tomorrow’s Tip:  Why and How to mark an email for Follow- Up