Outlook® 2007 Business Contact Manager For Dummies®

Chapter 17. Seek and Ye Shall Find Your Data

In This Chapter

• Querying for filters, or filtering for queries — finding your data

• Search folders: Your best friend for creating subsets of data

• Applying filters to your everyday job

Most of the earlier chapters in this book deal with how to enter data into BCM and how to use the different functions available. In this chapter, you find out how to dig into all the data you collect, how to find it, and how to create subsets of data that you can use for reporting, mail merging, or managing.

Note

BCM uses the terms filter and query interchangeably. In most of the dialog boxes, buttons, and menus, you see filter used, but when you save a filter to your hard drive it's stored as a BCM query with the .bcmq extension. So, in this chapter, we use the word filter; if you see query, just know that it's the same concept.

A filter is the way you select a subset of data from BCM to view. If you have 1,000 contacts in your contact database and want to see only your leads, you filter the report or view to show you only the contacts whose Classification field is marked as Lead. Or maybe you want to see only those contacts you met at the Spring Trade Show in 2006 (the Source field shows "Spring Trade Show 2006"). Now, instead of seeing all 1,000 contacts, you see only the 89 people you met at that show.

Filtering Your Data

BCM has a simple way to create a filter by just selecting check boxes and choosing a date range. BCM also has some powerful, advanced capabilities ...