I’ve been trying to use my mouse less for common computer tasks. With a little practice and the right keyboard shortcuts, this often ends up to be much quicker than using my mouse as well.

As I search through my emails on a regular basis, I was wondering whether there are any useful search shortcuts in Outlook?

For the longest time, I’ve been using Advanced Find and enabled its Query Builder to perform searches with multiple criteria and Boolean statements.

This works quite well but it can sometimes be slow to set up such a search within the Advanced Find window.

Can I also perform Boolean and multi criteria searches in Outlook without using Advanced Find?

For my job, I regularly need to do the same or very similar search queries in Outlook.

Some queries are a bit more complex so redoing them each time is a bit cumbersome.

Is there a way to save my Search queries so I can reuse them later rather than needing to redo them each time?

I heavily rely on the Search feature within Outlook to efficiently triage my emails. However, something appears to have been changed to how Search works. For instance;

• When I move messages from my Search results to a different folder, this isn’t directly reflected in the Search results anymore (when sorted by folder).
• Mailbox wide searches are always sorted by date instead of by folder.
• The Categories column isn’t shown even though it is added to the View.
• Categories are shown when the message is opened in the Reading Pane but I can’t remove them.

How I can I return Outlook’s Search behavior back to the way it was before?

Outlook can find emails with one or more attachments by specifying the “Has Attachments” option.

But how can I search for a specific type of attached file?
e.g. search for emails having .docx, .pdf, .xlsx or .zip files etc.

Is it also possible to only search for text within an attachment and not within the message body?

I’m sorting my emails into multiple folders and therefor frequently use the Search feature with the scope set to “Current Mailbox”, “All Mailboxes” or even “All Outlook Items”.

However, this also returns some unwanted results from folders which are basically always irrelevant to me.

For instance, I always want to exclude the following folders from my search results: Drafts, Deleted Items, Junk E-mail, RSS Subscriptions, Newsletters, Social Media Updates and some more.

Is there any way to apply such a search filter without complicating my search query?

Instant Search doesn’t display any results at all, only displays results before a certain date or always shows that there are items left to index. I let it index overnight but nothing has changed.

How can I get it to completely index my messages?

I noticed that Outlook’s search feature is case insensitive and I’m looking for an option to change this.

The reason I ask is because I have several friends and relatives that have names or last names that are also common words.

For instance first names such as; Hope, Sky, May, Norm, or Guy. And maybe even more frequently for last names such as; Brown, Winter, Black, Baker, Cook, or Young.

So when I search for their names, I get a lot of emails returned which contain the word instead of the name. With a case sensitive search, I hope to be able to distinguish between the two.

Is there a way to perform case sensitive searches in Outlook?

With the latest update for Outlook 2016, I noticed that I no longer have the Advanced Find feature. Is this a bug or was this an intentional change?

I regularly use Advanced Find for search queries that I can’t seem to perform via the small Search box at the top of my message list.

Is there any way to to get Advanced Find back in Outlook 2016?

Instant Search only works on the folder that I’m currently in or on the entire mailbox. I know I’m in the right project folder but it has too many subfolders to do my search on.

Is there some way to make it possible to search the subfolders for the folder that I’m in as well?