Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Fixing Outlook 2007 Searching

Until I got my new laptop, I'd always used Outlook Express as my email client. There wasn't any particular reason for it other than habit. However, I'm now using Outlook for email because it has much better spam filtering (and lots of other goodies as I'm discovering).

One problem though: searching didn't work. Even if I searched for a keyword I knew was in a message, it always returned no results. Apparently, this is pretty common, given all the messages on various forums about this problem. There are a variety of possible causes, but mine was caused by installing an Office 2003 component (in this case, FrontPage, which is not available with Office 2007). Fortunately, the fix was easy: repair Office 2007 as described here and then rebuild the index (not mentioned in that article but necessary nonetheless: choose Indexing Options from the Control Panel, then click Advanced and click Rebuild). Now my searches are lightning-fast, which is about a bazillion times faster than Outlook Express was.

As an aside, I purchased a copy of Microsoft Expression Web, the replacement for FrontPage, and promptly uninstalled Frontpage. So far, I like Expression Web. I'm not much of a Web page designer; I just need to maintain a couple of sites without too much fancy stuff. My favorite feature in Expression Web is master pages, which allows you to create a template for your Web site and then just add the content to each specific page.

4 comments:

Rick Schummer said...

Thanks Doug, this fixed my broken search too.

Anonymous said...

I heard about similar program fixing Outlook Express, fixing of folders of Outlook Express, extract e-mails from damaged Outlook Express folders, also save the fixed Outlook Express e-mails on disk and support to fix Outlook Express errors in a Batch mode, yet fixing of the attached files are obligatory.

Alex said...

I know good tool,which works with Outlook Express files and possible Outlook files,it has many features,also it is free-rebuild outlook express,software can resolve data corruption issues for Outlook Express email client,works with one of the most vulnerable elements of information systems,helps and it does not matter, what happened with your mailbox,works with Outlook Express versions 5, 5.5, 6 and all currently supported versions of Microsoft Windows operating system,preview all messages, that can be successfully retrieved from corrupted files with dbx extension,recovery of all emails from your mailbox in dbx format, if these dbx files are seriously corrupted and Outlook Express there was an error opening this message,will save separate files of eml format, that can be accessed by any email program.

Anonymous said...

When I sorted my contacts in OE unexpectedly all my contacts were deleted.In this situation I chose-inbox.dbx repair tool.Because as far as I remember tool helped my friend and it helped me too.Besides that it has free status as is known,and program extracts and saves the user's messages from files with the dbx extension that Outlook Express uses to store folders.