Find What You Need Faster in the New Outlook​

Between the search upgrades in the New Outlook and the addition of Microsoft 365 Copilot, locating that one specific attachment or thread has just got a whole lot faster and smarter.

Let's look at how to:

• Find what you need, fast​

• Use AI assistance with Copilot

1. Prefixes make the Outlook search function a whole lot faster.

Outlook uses what's called prefix matching when searching. In short, Outlook searches for words that start with your search term, but it won't find words where your term is buried in the middle or at the end.

So, if you type into the Search box: Ray

Outlook will return messages that contain ray, Ray, Raymond and Rays, but not Sunray.

It does this with every word in an email, not just the first word of the subject line or the first word of a sentence. For example, if you searched Pre, Outlook would find an email containing 'we need to prepare the presentations' as they both begin with Pre.

Outlook will use auto-complete, you don’t need to finish your thought. Typing mar will instantly surface emails from Marketing, threads about markets, or messages from your colleague Maria!

You might notice this is a lot quicker at bringing about these results as well 💨

2. Copilot adds the smarter part to Outlook Search

Copilot acts like a personal assistant inside your inbox, which means you can search with more conversational language.

You could ask 'Find emails related to project alpha' to find specific emails relating to that project.

You can take the next step and let Copilot do a full search to find content that might be in chats, meetings, files and not just emails. For example, 'where is the Project Alpha spreadsheet containing the UK budgets', and it will search across Microsoft 365.

Using the New Outlook will save you time and allow Copilot to take some work off your hands.

To learn more about the New Outlook in Microsoft 365 Copilot, book one of our live training sessions.