Once you've used Outlook for several months and have many items in your mailbox, calendar or contacts, you will probably begin to rely on Find, Advanced Find, and Views to help you find items in your folders quickly.

Find is a simple but powerful feature that's just a button-push away, so many people use it all the time, instead of using Advanced Find or Views. Find does a good job, but searches for your search terms in pre-selected fields and, as a result, it often returns many results that aren't what you wanted.

Did you know Find lets you search multiple folders in your message store, use multiple keywords, and choose between basic fields or all text fields? Open the Find pane by pressing the Find button on the Standard toolbar or use the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+E and I'll show you how it's done.

Let's say you need to find all messages from Bill or Wayne, so enter "Bill, Wayne" (without the quotes) in the Look For field. The comma (or semi-colon) separator tells Outlook to look for Bill or Wayne, if you didn't use a separator Outlook would search for a person named Bill Wayne. If you only need to search the current folder, press the Find now button, or select additional folders to search using the Search In menu. You can search any folder using this menu-for example, you search for Contacts or Calendar items when you are in the Inbox, but are limited in the fields the search looks in.

You have limited control over the fields Find uses by selecting (or deselecting) Options, Search All Text in Each Message. Searching all text results in a slower, more thorough search and returns more results. The fields Find uses depends on the Outlook folder type you begin the search in.

When Find is returning too many results, you can use Advanced Find and control which fields Outlook searches. While Find uses OR operator when you use a separator with multiple keywords, Advanced Find uses AND to string multiple criteria together. If you need to find messages from Bob or Wayne containing a specific subject, you'll want to Advanced Find, especially when you have a lot of messages from Bob and Wayne.

To help you out with frequently used searches, Outlook includes two predefined Advanced Finds, Find All From Sender and Find all related messages. To use the predefined searches, select a message from the sender you need to find messages from or a message that you'd like to find all related messages then right click and choose Find All, Choose From Sender or Related Messages. All related messages searches the Inbox, Sent Items, and Drafts folders for matches in the Conversation field. All from sender searches the Inbox, Drafts, and Sent Items folder for all messages from the sender.