Find e-mail and files faster

Of all the feedback we’ve gotten on the 7 Tips for Managing Your Files Better and 4 Ways to Keep Control of Your E-Mail Inbox, the most frequently asked question we get is how to find lost files and e-mail messages. You’re not alone. Despite my best efforts to stay organized I often have to search for older documents or e-mail messages that contain important information. The Search feature in Microsoft Windows XP and Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 can help, but they don’t always find what I need. Instead, I use the MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search to find files and e-mail messages on my computer.

Windows Desktop Search, when installed, adds a search box to your Windows XP taskbar. You can use it to search for files on your computer and e-mail messages in Outlook. It’s fast and—most importantly—it works great. I’ve used Windows Desktop Search for three months and it’s helped me find dozens of e-mail messages and files. In one instance, I found an obscure document that was more then two years old.

What I really like about Windows Desktop Search is being able to choose the type of results I see—everything, files or specific file types, or e-mail messages.

Start searching
To get started, you have to download and install the MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search. After you install it, Windows Desktop Search will take a couple of minutes to create an index of all the files and e-mail messages stored on your computer. You’ll know it’s done when a pop-up window shows up in your System Tray (in the bottom right corner of your computer screen).

Now you can start searching. Type a search query into the Windows XP taskbar and then click the green Search Desktop button or the green arrow button on the right side of the search box. All of your results will be shown in a Windows Desktop Search Results dialog box. It’s that easy.

Jason Kozleski

Comments

• Anonymous
  October 04, 2005
  How do you find word files that have been directly saved from e-mail attachments? More times than I care to admit, I have opened a word file that was sent to me in an e-mail, worked on it and then saved it without placing it into my own files. I have tried searching for the name, but I can never find it. <<I've struggled with this too! (And don't even want to tell you how mad I got...) What I suspect is happening is that your file is being saved to a temporary folder, which can be hard to track down in the file system. The work around that Jason and I use is to use the "Save As" option when saving any file we've opened from an attachment, then specifying where we want it to go. You can find the file by searching through your temporary folders, but I think it's easier to do the "Save As" option. --- ry>>
• Anonymous
  October 10, 2005
  I would love to be able to change the font or color or shape of the folders. Most people are color oriented where I work, and we have been directed to archive our emails to reduce the use on the server- I have archived several folders-which I could rename, but would rather be able to have the same name but in a purple font or a green font- so I could tell the difference as a sort the emails
  thanks
  cwhite@ahinc.org
• Anonymous
  October 15, 2005
  In order to be able to find emails from the past, it makes a large difference how you save them. I have had to learn how to "title" them so I know what I am looking for. Normally, now, I just put a title in search and it comes in within seconds, OR I categorize them in folders so that I know which one to look for them in. I have roughly 250 folders in documents. Some have just a few documents. Others such as my physiology or doctrine folders have hundreds of documents.
  
• Anonymous
  March 29, 2006
  We use the Cota System which has made file management real easy.  There is no software and this simple yet powerful system is worth it's wait in gold