Search Folders: Sinister Plot or Excellent Tool?
The other day I was cleaning my office and came across a paperback dictionary. “How quaint,” I thought, “a relic from the distant past.” Quaint?!? The distant past?!? Wow… I might be in need of some help… Apparently I have joined the class of technology-dependent people for whom life itself will come to a sudden and devastating halt if the power goes out. But I’ve decided to live in denial. After all, how often does the power actually go out?
As a technology-dependent person, I am on a constant quest for better, faster ways to do, well, everything. And for that, Microsoft Outlook is a godsend. Sometimes, late at night, I consider that it may also be a sinister plot on the part of Bill Gates to take over the universe. But I have a life to manage, the inability to manage it without technology, and the knowledge that a universe ruled by Bill Gates would at least never experience a power outage. So let me tell you about Search Folders—one of the new features of Outlook 2003.
Each day, I get a surprisingly large amount of email and email-like items: notes from friends and colleagues, messages from the numerous listservs I’m subscribed to, and even the latest news which an Outlook RSS AddIn faithfully delivers to me every hour or so. If you’re not familiar with RSS, I’ll be writing about that before too long, so stay tuned. Anyway, the point is I have a lot to work through every day. Over the years, I’ve dealt with this problem pretty effectively if I do say so myself. For instance, I have an elaborate system of mail rules. When I check my email, the news automatically goes to the News folder, listserv messages automatically go to their respective folders, messages from colleagues automatically go into the Work folder, and so on. To further organize things within each folder, I’ve grouped messages. This allows me to quickly look over listserv messages by topic or locate a work-related message by the name of the sender. Pretty clever, huh? Sadly, not clever enough. Given the ever-increasing volume of messages I receive and want to keep, finding a particular message requires too much effort—at least it did prior to Outlook 2003.
Search Folders let you quickly locate the messages that you want—and do so without having to use the Find command repeatedly. I now have a Search Folder called “Unread Work” which, not surprisingly, contains just the messages in my Work folder that are unread. I have another Search Folder called “For Follow Up.” Thanks to it, it doesn’t matter what folder a message is in: If a message is flagged for follow-up, I can find it in the “For Follow Up” Search Folder. I even created a Search Folder called “Social Security.” That folder’s job is to contain only those news items that contain the words Social Security—no more need for me to work past dozens of articles on the Michael Jackson trial to find out if I’ll retire at 65 or 85!
Now, I said that these folders contain messages. That’s not quite true. I even called them folders, which is also inaccurate. They’re not folders at all, it turns out. Rather, they are simply saved searches. But Search Folders look like all the other folders in my Folder List tree view. And they work just like all the other folders in my Folder List tree view. To quote Douglas Adams, “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.” Or, perhaps more accurately, it is irrelevant if we don’t have said aquatic bird on our hands, because functionally, for all intents and purposes, we have a duck. Likewise, it’s irrelevant that a Search Folder isn’t really a folder and doesn’t really contain messages: You won’t be able to tell the difference.
So how do you create a Search Folder?
- Get into the mail-related Folder List tree view by pressing Control 1. Then navigate to Search Folders.
- Use the context menu key (or right click) to bring up a context menu. Choose New Search Folder.
- In the New Search Folder dialog box, arrow to the search that describes what you wish to accomplish. For instance, if you want a virtual folder that contains messages from a particular person, arrow to “Mail from specific people” If instead you want to quickly locate messages and/or news stories on a particular topic, arrow to “Mail with specific words.”
- Once you have chosen the basic type of Search Folder you want, press Tab. Depending on your selection, you may find a Choose button. If so press it to specify things like the particular person or words you are interested in. After the Choose button, you’ll find a combo box named “Search mail in”. You will likely only find Personal Folders listed, which is almost certainly what you want. If you want to narrow it down to just a few folders in Personal Folders, you will need to create a Custom Search folder instead. I will try to write about that before too long.
- Press the OK button to create your folder.
You’ll find your new folder in the Search Folders item of your Folder List tree view. And you’ll probably want to rename it. For instance, I renamed the “Containing Social Security” folder to “Social Security” so that I can jump to it more quickly with the keyboard. To rename the folder, be sure it is selected and then press F2. Type the new name and press Enter, just like you would to rename an icon on your Desktop. Finally, you can add your new Search Folder to your Favorite Folders in Outlook. The Favorite Folders appear at the very top of the mail-related Folder List tree view, above Personal Folders. To add a Search Folder to the Favorite Folders, use the context menu and select “Add to Favorite Folders.”
Caution: Because Search Folders do look and act just like actual folders, people sometimes think that they are working with a copy of a message and not the original. Those people are wrong: You are working with the original; the Search Folder just saved you the hassle of finding it. If for example, you delete a message from the Unread Work Search Folder, you are actually deleting the message from your Work folder.
—jd