Advanced Find in the address book

[JuliaB]

Hi, I recently upgraded my Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007. I do not use
exchange, but I do use Office Calendar (by Lookout Software) to share
calendars and contacts. From what I've seen on the internet, I expected when
creating a new message, to be able to search for contacts, by clicking To:,
and use the Advanced Find to be able to search for other fields within a
contact, like company or title or city. However, my advanced find window,
has only one field, that is "Find names containing". Compared to other
examples from what I've seen on the internet, where you can search in the
Display Name, First Name, last name, Title, Alias, Company, etc. Also, if I
try to choose More Columns radio dial button to have it search for a key word
in a different field it appears to do nothing. Do I have to have Exchange to
be able to search in other fields of a contact? Thanks

 

[Russ Valentine]

You would never use the address book view of your Contacts for searching.
You search in the Contacts Folder.

 

[JuliaB]

Actually in our office, that is almost a 100% of the time the way we do it.
They are going to send an email to a myriad of people. So they pick new
email message, choose to, and then need to search for the people that they
want. Because we have 81 parishes, and 100 priests, and 10 schools, and
dozens of other groups of people, we need to be able to have a good way of
organizing them so that they can choose the people that they want to send the
email to. That is what we are trying to figure out. They can't be just
alphabetized, because you might not know WHO the principal of a school is,
but you know you need to find the principal in a named parish. If you have a
better way of doing it, that I could educate my staff that is exactly the
answers that I am looking for. I am trying to implement categories, but the
ability to search for the different fields is huge here.

 

[Russ Valentine]

The first thing you need to understand is that the address book interface is
a deprecated relic from Outlook 97 that is no longer useful nor is it the
intended interface for searching for or filtering recipients.
For the past 12 years all searching and filtering functions have been built
into the Contacts Folders where they are quite robust (that's where you can
use Categories, Instant Search and Advanced Find). Your users simply need to
get with the times and use Outlook the way it was intended: Find and select
their recipients first from the Contacts Folder, select them, then start the
message (Hint: Actions > New Message to Contact..)
Abandon the Address Book view once and for all. Protestants have. Time for
the Catholics to get up to speed.