OT: Need a bit of help with Outlook

[Wilson Logan]

Silly question but... does anyone know how to do a string search in Outlook?

Say I wanted to search my Inbox for occurances of "PG Offline".  If I enter PG Offline in the search box, the actual search I get is equivalent to "PG" AND "Offline". Do I need delimiters in my search string to denote that I want it treated as one piece?

Thanks,

Wilson.

[Brandon]

Tools -> Advanced Find -> Advanced tab. Use the Field dropdown button to select what field to search (probably Mail -> Subject, or Message is what you want). In the condition field choose "contains" and in the value field type your exact string with double quotes, "PG Offline". It's not case sensitive. If you want to search both the Subject and Message fields, you'll have to do two separate searches, each with the appropriate criteria (because it ANDs multiple criteria, you'd want OR which it won't do). At least that's how my Outlook 2000 works. 2003 may be different.. I've yet to find a utility that improves Outlook's searching abilities. Anyone know of one?

[Wilson Logan]

Brandon,

Top man!  Thanks for that. I didn't imagine I'd have to delve so deep into Outlook to get it to do something so fundamental but... there you are I guess.

Cheers,

Wilson.