Office XP Tips: Find Outlook Messages Quickly

Handy commands that help you sift through piles of e-mail.

Jim Welp

The mailbag is brimming with goodies this week. I'll get to that in a sec, but first I want to tell you about a couple of handy Outlook commands that help you get your hands on old e-mail messages quickly.

Outlook: Related Messages, Messages From Sender

For me, Outlook is sort of like a giant database for my personal correspondence. I'm pretty good at deleting unnecessary messages, but I do keep a lot of old stuff neatly tucked away into folders. When I need to refer to an old message, I can usually find it pretty quickly using the Find command (select Tools, Find). But often I want to search for old e-mail related to a message that's currently in my face. Specifically, I'll want to find a message that's from the same sender or has the same subject as the currently open message.

Outlook has a couple of commands for this purpose: Related Messages and Messages from Sender. To generate a list of messages with the same subject, select a message in any folder and choose Actions, Find All, Related Messages. To generate a list of messages from the same sender, select a message in any folder and choose Actions, Find All, Messages from Sender. Outlook opens the Advanced Find dialog box and presents you with a list of messages that match the search you chose. Double-click any message to open it. This method can be better than simply clicking a heading in the folder view to sort messages because it returns all messages in the current folder, plus those in the Inbox, Drafts, and Sent Items folders. To expand the search, click the Browse button in the Advanced Find dialog box to add more folders to your search.

When Is a Hyperlink not a Hyperlink?

Office XP Tips subscriber Danny Thody of San Antonio, Texas, wrote in response to my newsletter about hyperlinks. In that issue I discussed Word 2002's default method of requiring the user to hold down the Ctrl key to click through to a hyperlink's destination. I like this method because a live left-click link makes hyperlinks hard to edit. But Danny points out that the Ctrl-click method is an option that can be turned off. If you don't want to have to hold down the Ctrl key to click through, choose Tools, Options and click the Edit tab. Then click to uncheck the option called "Use CTRL + Click to follow hyperlink," and click OK.

Controlling Widows and Orphans

Reader Larry Dreifke of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, wrote in search of a way to turn off Word's default widow and orphan control. While the definitions differ somewhat depending upon which design religion you practice, widow and orphan are two charming printing terms for text left conspicuously alone from the rest of its paragraph. Word calls a single line of text from a paragraph left alone at the top of a page or column a widow, and it calls a line of text from a paragraph left alone at the bottom of a page or column an orphan. To prevent this unsightly happenstance, Word by default forces at least two lines of text onto the top or bottom of the page or column, which is more help than Larry wants.

If you want to turn off widow and orphan control for one incident, select a paragraph (or paragraphs), choose Format, Paragraph, and click the "Line and Page Breaks" tab. Click the check box called "Widow/Orphan control" to turn it off. If, like Larry, you want to turn the option off for all time, you can edit your Normal.dot template file. That's the file Word uses as the basis for all new files. For instructions on how to find and modify Normal.dot, see "Ins and Outs of Word Templates."

Grade-Book Templates

Office XP Tips subscriber Paul Telma of Austin, Texas, is jealous of his fellow teachers because they're using Excel to keep track of their students' grades. Paul is right: Excel is a great place to keep a grade book. Not only can you take advantage of its mathematical functions to calculate grades, but if you keep your grade book safely tucked away in your computer, there is no way little Bart Simpson can sneak in and use his number two pencil to change an F to a B. But this is a case when it's not necessary to reinvent the wheel. Microsoft provides on its Web site a slew of templates created for teachers. There you'll find Excel templates for grade books based on averages, percentages, or points. But wait, there's more! You'll also find Office templates for tests, lesson plans, schedules, and certificates. Check it all out at the Microsoft Office Template Gallery for Teachers.

To look at the templates, click "Go to Preview." If you want to use one of the templates, just click "Edit in Microsoft Excel."