About this lesson
How to search and find a certain appointment or date quickly.
Lesson versions
Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:
2016, 2019/365.
Quick reference
Search the Calendar
How to search and find a certain appointment or date quickly.
When to use
Through the course of using the Outlook Calendar, you will have times when a fast search for a certain item is necessary. This lesson shows you how to do it.
Instructions
Quickly skip ahead or back to other months
- On the Navigation pane calendar, click and hold the month name.
- A span of prior and future months will appear, just click the one you want. You may have to select a month and then repeat this process to get to the right one.
Go to a specific date
- Right-click the calendar and choose “Go To Date” (or Press Ctrl + G.)
- Choose your date and click OK.
Search calendar for words or categories
- By far the most efficient tool is the Search Calendar box (or press Ctrl + E.)
- Type any word or category name into the Search box and the results will display as a spreadsheet list.
- Another example is this.
- To clear or close the Search box, click the X on the right side.
- On the Search toolbar, click the Categorized button, select "Any category".
- Notice the search box contains: NOT category:=[]
- Backspace over the last "]" (bracket) to view all categories.
- 00:05 There comes a time you just have to search your calendar.
- 00:07 You just have to find that appointment on that date.
- 00:11 Let me show you a couple things.
- 00:12 Let's start over on the calendar on the left hand side.
- 00:15 If you press and hold, on the month, press and hold.
- 00:19 You can see that you can go forward a couple of months and
- 00:22 back a couple of months.
- 00:23 That's kind of nice just kind of skip ahead and go forward again.
- 00:25 That's kind of nice, always reset with the today button.
- 00:29 Now, another way is I can hit these arrows and inch myself a weekend at time ahead.
- 00:35 That's okay, hit the Today button.
- 00:37 But the best way is to actually hit the Search Calendar right up here
- 00:41 above your calendar.
- 00:43 So Search Calendar with a magnifying glass.
- 00:45 This is the most intuitive way.
- 00:46 Now, I can just type any words, so
- 00:48 I want to find just anything with the word class in it.
- 00:52 As you can see, I've got my categories here, I've got my dates,
- 00:56 I can sort these just click on subject click on category.
- 00:59 It's your personal preference, how you handle it after you find it.
- 01:03 But I kind of want to find certain categories because I
- 01:06 noticed not all of these have been set for my training color.
- 01:11 At this point, this is an active calendar still,
- 01:14 I can actually go ahead and click and change this.
- 01:17 I can right click and tell it training.
- 01:20 I can right click and undo that red one, you can put multiple colors.
- 01:23 Sometimes appointments land in multiple categories, it's okay to do that.
- 01:27 And then when I sort by category there I go I've got them all together.
- 01:31 All right, let's go ahead and and do this, I want to show you something else.
- 01:34 So I clicked on this appointment, let me go to my busy week.
- 01:37 Here we go, I've got a very busy week going on.
- 01:40 And I just want to find all my appointments.
- 01:43 I just want to sort them by subject find all my appointments one fell swoop.
- 01:46 All right, I'm going to click on the Search Calendar, I'm going to come over to
- 01:50 categorize, I'm going to come right down here to any category,
- 01:54 this is kind of the secret sauce.
- 01:56 There's a little bit of magic about to happen on the screen.
- 01:58 When I click on categorize any category, click as you can see,
- 02:02 obviously you can't see everything on my appointments.
- 02:05 There should be 100 of them and they're not there, just the colored ones.
- 02:09 Well, look at the text inside the search box.
- 02:11 Now, I'm not trying to make you into a programmer but
- 02:14 I just have to explain to you that you're the boss of this,
- 02:17 you can tell it to find everything by eliminating that one last symbol.
- 02:21 So it says NOT category:=, that is not a square.
- 02:25 That is an open bracket in a close bracket.
- 02:28 I'm going to click behind that closed bracket.
- 02:31 I'm just going to Backspace on that one single symbol,
- 02:34 I'm going to delete that symbol.
- 02:36 Look what happens on my screen, Backspace.
- 02:39 There you go, everything just showed up on my screen, everything.
- 02:44 So now I can scroll through, I can sort by subject, I can sort by categorize.
- 02:49 If I want to, I can collapse these, right-click collapse all groups.
- 02:55 Now, I've got them open.
- 02:56 I can open each one individually.
- 02:57 I can open this one and find out, well, why aren't these categorized?
- 03:01 I can go through and categorize, it's kind of a great system.
- 03:05 So let's review real quick, I'm going to close that entirely, reset to today and
- 03:10 I'll just click anywhere on my calendar.
- 03:13 I want to search my calendar, I want to search categorize,
- 03:16 search any category, backspace over that final bracket, backspace,
- 03:21 there you go everything is on your screen.
- 03:24 How you handle it from here? It's up to you,
- 03:25 but it's kind of great to see everything.
- 03:27 You can even print right now and have that whole list printed.
- 03:32 Thank you.
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