Discover stuff about your contacts (however it was done)

Windows Desktop Search has made finding emails and documents much simpler but Outlook still has a few tricks up its sleeve.

My very first post on this blog was about the rarely used Activities tab (that you see when you view details for one of your Outlook Contacts) and its ability to tell you when you're next scheduled to meet that person. Or when you last emailed them. Or they emailed you. Or pretty much whatever.

Well, I say whatever. But you may have noticed that by default Outlook only searches in folders containing email, contacts, future tasks and appointments, journal items and notes. So how do you search somewhere else, like in an archive personal folder or a public folder? Here's how:

• In Outlook, select the Go menu, then Folder List
• Click the Contacts folder you want (of you have more than one)
• On the File menu, point to Folder, click Properties for "yourcontactsfoldername" , and then click the Activities tab.
• Click New
• In the Name box, type a name for the folder group you're creating then select the folder you wish to add.
• While you're there you can change the default search location too to restrict the default search to the folder group that is most relevant to you.

Compared to Windows Desktop Search this method can feel a little slow. But the interface is really intuitive (once you get your head around it!) and can be done with just a few mouse clicks instead of having to type a complex search query. And being able to find all information relating to a contact whether it resides on your machine or in a public folder can sometimes be very handy.

One final tip: Outlook can only search one set of personal folders at a time. This means you cannot search in, say, your archive folder and another .pst file during the same search. To get round this you can easily make a separate folder group for each set of folders then search in each group separately.