I recently stumbled across the advanced search features in Outlook 2010. To be fair I haven’t been using Outlook for too many months. My corporate email was Lotus Notes for the past 15 years and I use gmail at home. Here is my default view of the Outlook 2010 inbox with the search box that I’ve been using marked:
What I didn’t notice is that when I would click in the search box then the advanced search tab appears (it’s invisible on the default view). My eye focus was so drawn to the search filter and results that I went months without noticing all the advanced search features.
The feature I had been looking for was how to search all folders. Finally I can search once instead of looking through individual folders! Looking at it now on the screen it’s so obvious that the tool bar and features are there. It goes to show the power of focused attention. I guess this was suppose to be intuitive. So I failed the test. :-O