Google Mail - Finding What You Want When You Want It...

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...otherwise known as effective searching.

The number 1 biggest frustration expressed to me with Google Mail is finding an old email.  It often comes down to how to use best the search bar.

Most people, I have discovered, do not really want to learn how to use Booleans in Google searches. They just want to be able to type in what they know and get what they want.  There is a solution for this - the advanced search available that is hidden behind the little down arrow at the right end of the search bar -

If you click on that, you get this pop-up window -


Put the information you know in the appropriate places (in my example, I'm looking for an email from my husband, received during the 2015-2016 school year about evaluations but I don't know what the subject line was) -

THEN run your search, and you should see better results (in my example, here is the email I was looking for) -

You can use as many or as few of the fields as you would like. You may notice after you perform the search that there IS a way to type it into the search bar, but it seems just as easy to use the little arrow to get there.

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