Views offer an alternative to using Find or Advanced Find. Unlike Find, Views are persistent and reusable, but only show the items in one folder, while Find, Advanced Find and Search Folders can show you items from multiple folders.

Views, Advanced Find, and Search Folders all use the same dialog, so once you learn how to write effective search criteria, you can use these options in many ways. One drawback to the search dialog is the inability to use the OR operator to create more robust filters; each set of conditions is joined with AND.

However, you can use Views to work with multiple criteria, by using Filter to reduce the number of items shown and Automatic Formatting to apply color to the remaining messages. For example, with custom views you can create a view that shows all messages that arrived last week, were from Bob OR contained a specific keyword in the subject. You can format the messages from Bob in blue text and messages containing specific keywords with green text. To hide the remaining messages, use a final formatting rule to format the remaining messages using small white or light gray text. Rearrange the order of the Automatic Formatting rules to control how they are applied to your messages.

Ok, so that's probably not the best example for Views -- you could find the same messages using Find and searching for "bob, keyword", and the basic search (Options, All Text in Messages is not selected) then looking the date fields to see which ones arrived last week. But this example gives you an idea how you can use both Filters and Automatic Formatting to help you find things. If you wanted to find all the messages that arrived last week AND were from Bob AND that contained the keyword, use Advanced Find.

Views work well for non-message items that you can't use Search Folders for, such as Calendar, Contacts and Tasks. Search Folders (Outlook 2003 only), are persistent searches with the search results stored in a virtual folder. Use Search Folders when you need to reuse a Find or Advanced Find on message folder. In previous versions, you would use Automatic Formatting to highlight important messages, such as from your boss, now you can use Search Folders to view all of your messages from the boss, all grouped together in one folder. After creating a Find or Advanced Find on message folder, you save them as Search Folders or create a new search folder by right clicking on Search Folder and select New Search Folder.

Diane Poremsky is the president of CDOLive LLC and a Microsoft Outlook MVP. She's coauthor of Word 2002: The Complete Reference (Osborne, 2001) and Beginning Visual Basic 6 Application Development (for Wrox Press). For questions or suggestions for future columns, write her at outlook@cdolive.com.