Special Edition Using Microsoft® Office XP

Searching for Office Files

The Open dialog box displays a list of all files in the current folder. Searching for a specific file can be tedious if the folder is full of files with similar names, or if it's organized into many subfolders. Office includes a powerful Search tool, available in the Search task pane, that enables you to search for files or Outlook messages—even Web pages—by using almost any criteria. If you can remember a few scraps of information about the file—part of the name, a date, or even a word or phrase that you remember using in the document—you can probably find it.

For example, a sales manager might look on a shared network file server for all presentations that have been updated in the past week. Or, a legal secretary ...