Improving Outlook Efficiency with Instant Search
Executive summary
To improve Outlook efficiency, by the end of this article you will be able to build Outlook instant search queries such as these:
- I want to search in Outlook for the “email that I received last month from John Prospect that had an attachment”
- I want to find the “email that I sent to Bill Lead that had no attachments was medium size was flagged high was about ‘Proposal’ and was cc’ed to my manager” so I can show it to my co-worker for knowledge transfer.
The Information Overload
The Sunday edition of New York Times has more information than the average person received 400 years ago in the whole lifetime.
We are living in an era of information overload. Before the advent of the information age facilitated by computers, information was power, and people, in general, were able to remember it. Furthermore, the people who had the information were able to take strategic decisions that influenced positively the financial bottom line.
However, on the other side, today, inundated by information a research study found that:
- 38% of managers reported wasting substantial amounts of time looking for information;
- 43% thought that decisions were delayed or adversely affected by the existence of too much information;
- 60% reported stress and tiredness related to the information overload
And to add to the stress, information overload makes it impossible to remember everything. This introduced a problem that eventually received a solution. Welcome to the arrival of search engines.
Specialized Searches
Search became part of our skill set in the 21st century.
We know how to use general search engines such as google or bing, or specialized searches such as:
- questions and answers on Quora,
- flight search such as momondo or skyscanner,
- job search engines such indeed.
But what about Outlook and our inbox? Indeed, we should be able to search our inbox with the same ease as any other search engine therefore, we will introduce in this post the powerful search language of Outlook that can help you find any email, instantly.
Outlook Efficiency with Instant Search
Email is the main culprit for information overload in the workplace with employees, in some cases, checking their email for 3h/day.
Furthermore, another research study found that there is a 68% decrease in productivity when employees feel that arent’ enough hours in the day to complete their tasks.
Therefore, what could you do if you could get back a few hours each day when you don’t need to manually review and filter your inbox? Let’s build the skill set to get control of your inbox.
Below, we will build Outlook efficiency by adding the search skills progressively from easy to advanced. You will find search just above the emails pane when you look into your inbox.
The simplest query is to look for the emails received/sent today or yesterday:
received: today
received: yesterday
Date Ranges
If you would like a certain date range you would write:
received: >= 12/1/2020 and received:<=12/15/2020
Advanced date filters
For example, if you want the emails in a date range that contains the word Outlook in their subject line, were sent with High Importance, and also have attachments you would write:
received: >= 12/1/2020 and received:<=12/15/2020 and subject:”Outlook” and hasflag:true and hasattachment:true
Search ribbon
The search itself has also ribbon buttons to help you build your query:
More complex queries
Below we will give the solution to the inquiries presented at the beginning of this post.
I want to search in Outlook for the “email that I received last month from John Prospect that had an attachment”
Received:last month from:”John Prospect” hasattachments:yes
I want to find the “email that I sent to Bill Lead that had no attachments was medium size was flagged high and was about ‘Proposals’ and was cc’ed to my manager” so I can show it to my co-worker for knowledge transfer.
sent:”Bill Lead” attachments:no messagesize:medium isflagged:yes about:Proposal cc:manager@company.com
If you would like a complete list of all the properties that can be used to improve Outlook efficiency with Instant Search queries we recommend Microsoft website.
Count
Sometimes you need to know how many emails you received in a certain period (for example last week versus this week). While search helps, getting those counts is tedious especially if you need to repeat the search for received and sent items.
We built IntelliMails to offer complete statistics and metrics related to your emails and to furthermore give you valuable insights and intelligence to make data-driven decisions. You can try IntelliMails free for 30 days.