the other day i saw somebody searching for an email inside their microsoft outlook and they
had a file structure where they're looking through different folders that they've set
up and placed emails into so i suggested using search inside microsoft outlook to find what
they're looking for and they did type it in but it returned a lot of different emails and still
didn't find that specific one so i mentioned that you can go even deeper and more specific inside
microsoft outlook for a search and that's what i want to show you here today on teachers tech
hi my name is jamie and welcome to teachers tech if you're looking for other microsoft outlook
tutorials i'll put the link to my playlist down below in the description then you can check out
some other things if you're just learning but let's talk about search inside microsoft outlook
i am using office 365 for this demo here and to get to search if you look at the very top you'll
see the search as soon as i click in search or just hover over top you're going to see there's
some shortcuts there it says control plus e or all plus q to open up the search so i'm just
going to go ahead and click in search and it opens up this drop down and what it's saying
these are some ones that i've recently searched for so if you want to search for them again they
just put them right there because they know that they're common what you've looked for what i'm
going to just do is click off to the side and you can see since i've clicked in that search
it's opened up the search tab i can go ahead and close this if i want right away by clicking here
now i just want to talk about where it defaults first so if you're looking for a specific
email this is defaults to the current mailbox that you're in so if you know your uh if your
email you're looking for is in a different mailbox uh you'll need to switch to that you can switch
to that mailbox and do the search or what you could do is go all mailboxes and this defaults to
current mailbox you can actually change this and i'll show you how to make those changes and some
of the options at the end of this video so this is the first part where i'd be looking for especially
if you have a structure inside your email already with organization with folders and subfolders
because you can go to those folders and then go and look specifically through a current folder
a subfolder or if you're looking for everything go ahead and look all outlook items because you
haven't maybe categorized it through one of your folders you can look for everything
so this would be the first place i would stop to start narrowing down your email search so let's
say you've gone through your scope here of all the different folders or mailboxes that it might be
in still can't find it so maybe you're afraid that you've deleted this you can just select this right
here so if i click on this notice how it's grayed out around that means it's going to include the
deleted items in your search all right let's do a little test search real quickly here if i wanted
to look for an order of something so i could type in order and nothing comes up with my current
mailbox i can switch it over to my all mailboxes and then i get a highlight for those words so i
have multiple ones so you can see how a kind of a basic search works let's say if i'm looking from
a specific person and i'm going to go over here and refine this and i'll stay in all mailboxes so
i'll just go i'm going to clear this by clicking this x here and it notice it just clears out
i'm going to go from a sender so i'm going to say from and it comes up with sender name and this is
where i can write in the name so i'll put in my name and i'll just search for there and it comes
back in all mailboxes you can see there's this many now i can go a little bit more specific here
if i go in subject and maybe i'll know i'll type in hello because i know that's one of the subjects
and i'll take hello and it gives me back the specific email that i'm looking for now i
could even go more specific if i had let's say hundreds of these emails still and i knew there
was attachments connected to this i could go ahead and just click attachment and this one does have
an attachment uh so it's showing but if you know that that does have an attachment you can go ahead
and click on this i'm going to go ahead and clear this search result here and just go back to it and
now i just want to talk about some of these others to refine and if you are the type of person that
are you're taking advantage of the categorized colors and flagging and important markers this
can really be helpful when finding your emails so if i'm looking for and i'll go to all mailboxes
you can search for a certain categorized color i'll just give this an example
you can see this has a categorization here so it shows so if you are adding those things to your
emails it will help you later on yeah even when finding your email so that's something you can do
prior to even getting to the search stage we do have a few more options here i'm just going to
close out of this and just taking out the re taking a look at the refine look we have the sent
to now you can set do you want to find things that are sent to me or cc to me are not sent directly
to me or sent to another recipient so notice as i hove over hover over any of these it gives that
information so it can specifically show you help you understand what you're looking for so that's
a little bit about refining in your search to find specifically what you're looking for
so i just want to point out advanced search to you now i'm going to go back up to the search bar here
and notice that over to the right i have a drop down and this is going to be your advanced search
so if i go ahead click on it and you can see this is where i can also do a search so i could change
the mailbox or the folder or the changes just like the different ways i've showed you i can
go through here and quickly kind of click on all the different things that i want where i could say
it has an attachment and i can click and i can write some information this attachment contains
i could put my from in here anything in the body of the email that i could do a search for
i received if i know i got it between a certain time period i could put the start date to the
end date subject the two and i could add more options so if i go ahead and click on this
you can see we have more options that we can just select and that will add so if i was going to say
i'll say bcc and categories and apply it now if you notice i have bcc and categories that i can
search for through so you can create this advanced search so this might be a quicker way to for you
to find and kind of specifically make it the way that you want that you can just go through and
click on the certain options that you've set now i just want to go through some of the options of
setting up your your search and how you can make some changes like i mentioned at the beginning
all right now let's get to the options now the first thing i just want to point out notice how
i moved the scope to here and i'm going to show you how you can set these up in a different order
if you want to but there's a couple different ways you can go to options and mine right now i have
search tools here i'll go back to it i have search tools i'll drop down and i have search options and
it brings me to this now if you don't have that where you can go if you go back to file to the
very beginning here and you can see options at the very bottom here and then then if i go to search i
have some options i can change now i mentioned this before right now it defaults to the current
folder so current mailbox when searching from the inbox you can change that to all mailboxes if you
wanted it to default there and if you go through you can kind of check uh check uh different ones
on and off do you want to include messages from deleted items in each folder when searching
so this is turned off right now i do you want a different color uh search highlighted so i
had yellow and i looked for order it came up with yellow you can change that so those are just some
of the options that you can change in it now i want to point out in your custom ribbon here
so and then i'm going to go over to the right here and click where it says main tabs i'm going to go
to tool tabs and notice that we have search right here so i'm just going to open this up
and we have scope refine results options close i can change the order of these so i've moved up
scope i can just click and drag these around and change so right now i have results if i hit ok i
have results first so you can change the order that you want for these so i hope this search
tutorial today in microsoft outlook has given you a little bit of help with it because we can
get thousands and thousands of emails and we don't always remember to categorize them the way we want
so let me know what else you're looking for that i can help you with some tech tutorials thanks
for watching this week on teachers tech i'll see you next time with more tech tips and tutorials