Use Instant Search for Fast, Precise Searching (Outlook 2007)

Instant Search is the new way to find things in Outlook 2007. This fast and flexible tool replaces the somewhat clunky Find features from previous versions of Outlook. Instant Search is always available in these Outlook views: Calendar, Contacts, Folder List, Journal, Mail, and Tasks. The look and position of the search box varies slightly from view to view, but it is always at or near the top of the pane you will be searching.

Here's what it looks like in Mail view:

Instant Search your Mail.

And here's what it looks like in Calendar view:

Instant Search your Calendar.

As you can see, the Instant Search box is smoothly integrated into the look of the current view.

At its most basic, to do an Instant Search of the current view, type a word or phrase into the Instant Search box. As you type, all the Outlook items that don't contain the text you have typed so far disappear. This means you can stop typing as soon as you spot the item you're searching for, instead of having to enter the entire search word or phrase, click Search, then wait for results to appear. This is a real improvement over the old Find.

If this were all there was to Instant Search, it would be a cool addition to Outlook. But there is a lot more to Instant Search that you should know.

Digging Deeper Into Instant Search

As I said before, there's a lot more to Instant Search than what we've covered so far. We're not going to go into all the details of this powerful feature (that's better suited to a book than this website), but we should touch on two more aspects of Instant Search here. They are:

Getting Instant Search ready to go
Expanding the Instant Search pane for more possibilities

Getting Instant Search Ready to Go

To do its job, Instant Search requires something called the Windows Desktop Search component. Vista, the latest version of Windows, includes the Windows Desktop Search component. But Windows XP and other versions of Windows do not. If you're going to use Outlook 2007 on any version of Windows other than Vista, you'll need to install the component for Instant Search to do everything it is capable of.

Microsoft makes this easy. If the Windows Desktop Search component isn't already installed, the first time you start Outlook 2007, a dialog box like the one below will pop up asking if you want to install it.

Time to update so Instant Search works well.

Time to install the Windows Desktop Search component.

The take-away message here is that if you see a dialog box like this when you start Outlook 2007, and you want to get the most out of Instant Search, you need to download the update.

Expanding the Instant Search Pane for More Possibilities

Look carefully at the Instant Search box. Note the double down-arrow to the right of it. You know what that means. Click it, and Instant Search expands. The expanded Instant Search pane gives you lots of ways to customize your search.

An expanded Instant Search pane.

Exactly what you will see in the expanded pane depends on which view you are in. In Calendar view you might see a Location field, while in Mail view, you would see a From field. But you get the idea. When you expand the Instant Search pane, you see additional fields that are relevant to the current view.

Enter information into the boxes to search in those fields. As you type in a box, Instant Search shows you the items that contain the text you've typed in the field you are searching.

Click a field name to see a list of other fields you can replace it with.

Use Add Criteria to increase the number of fields that appear in the expanded Instant Search pane.

It's actually harder to explain than it is to use.

That's all I have to say about Instant Search here. There are even more things to know about it, but for most of us, most of the time, what we've talked about here is more than enough information to put Instant Search to use. Enjoy!

Return to the Outlook 2007 Introduction page.