About natural language searching

Natural language searching uses familiar, conversational expressions, such as "Get all mail from Jane" or "Find all meetings next week," to search for Microsoft Outlook items from the Basic Search task pane. Using natural language searching you can search for e-mail messages, calendar items, contacts, tasks, and notes. Natural language searching is only supported in English versions of Microsoft Office XP.

Although you can get better results by including more information in your natural language queries, you do not need to use full sentences or be concerned with grammatical correctness. For instance, the following natural language query is fine: "High priority tasks."

Natural language searching searches the contents of Outlook items, such as the bodies of e-mail messages, along with items' properties, such as the subjects of meetings and the priorities of tasks.

Note   Although natural language searching is not supported for documents on network places or your computer, Office's Search will use the information in a natural language search query to find files in those locations.

Natural Languages Tips

Searching e-mail

• Search the contents of e-mail messages, using words like "about" or "subject".

  Examples

  "Messages about searching"

  "Messages on the subject: sales quotas"

• Search the properties and other fields of e-mail messages.

  Examples

  "High priority messages"

  "Who did I Cc about natural language searching?"

  "E-mail I need to follow-up on"

• Search for documents containing attachments.

  Example

  "Find all mail messages with attachments"

• Specify time ranges to narrow your search.

  Examples

  "E-mail from Bob in the last week about natural language searching"

  "Find the most recent e-mail from Prasanna"

Searching your calendar

• Search the contents of meetings using words words like "about" or "subject".

  Examples

  "Meeting about sales goals"

  "Show the meeting to introduce new team members"

• Search for meetings based on attendees.

  Examples

  "All meetings with Jim"

  "Find the meeting organized by Tanya"

  "Did Bei-Jing accept the meeting about searching?"

• Limit the range of your search by specifying a range of time.

  Examples

  "Find all meetings I attended last Monday"

  "Find all meetings the day before yesterday"

Searching contacts

• Search for contacts based on details, such as nickname or birthday.

  Example

  "Find everyone whose manager is Miles"

• Find a group of contacts that have common information.

  Example

  "Contact information for clients who live in Baltimore"

Searching notes

• Search for notes based on contents, color, or other properties of notes.

  Examples

  "All notes I created yesterday"

  "All blue notes about searching"

Other tips

• Narrow your search by specifying the folder to search in.

  Example

  "E-mail in my Inbox that I haven't read yet"

• Use quotation marks to keep a phrase together.

  Example

  "Show me meetings about "natural language searching" in the next 5 days"

• Specify the order in which you want results returned.

  Example

  "E-mail from Helmut, sorted oldest message first"