Nested boolean searches?

M

Michael Grant

I'm loving Entourage 2008, but I'd love it even more if I could create saved
searches that are a little more fine-grained (e.g. "(category is A OR b) AND
due date is today"). Is there any way to do this, perhaps with an
AppleScript?

Thanks,
Michael
 
D

Diane Ross

Michael Grant said:
I'm loving Entourage 2008, but I'd love it even more if I could create saved
searches that are a little more fine-grained (e.g. "(category is A OR b) AND
due date is today"). Is there any way to do this, perhaps with an
AppleScript?
Click to expand...

This should work....

Match is all criteria is met:

Category is yyy
Due Date Today

Match is all criteria is met:

Category is xxx
Due Date Today

Looking at how to combine these.... Just thinking out loud here....

What if you used a rule to move these messages by category to a folder?
(remember rules can copy message if you do not want them left in the
original location) Then you could do a search:

Match is all criteria is met:
Is in folder zzz
Due Date Today
 
M

Michael Grant

This should work....

Match is all criteria is met:

Category is yyy
Due Date Today

Match is all criteria is met:

Category is xxx
Due Date Today

Looking at how to combine these.... Just thinking out loud here....

What if you used a rule to move these messages by category to a folder?
(remember rules can copy message if you do not want them left in the
original location) Then you could do a search:

Match is all criteria is met:
Is in folder zzz
Due Date Today
Click to expand...

I suppose I can first save my OR search, then use that saved search as one
of the criteria for my AND search. Not too elegant but it should work. Now
if I could organize saved searches in folders....

Michael
 
D

Diane Ross

Michael Grant said:
I suppose I can first save my OR search, then use that saved search as one
of the criteria for my AND search. Not too elegant but it should work. Now
if I could organize saved searches in folders....
Click to expand...

Good suggestion on the folders for saved searches. Send feedback on this.

Same goes for Categories. What I do when naming categories is use a naming
method like this:

Personal
Personal: Family
Personal: Phone
Personal: Medical

Not very elegant, but it works.
 
W

William Smith

Diane said:
Good suggestion on the folders for saved searches. Send feedback on this.

Same goes for Categories. What I do when naming categories is use a naming
method like this:

Personal
Personal: Family
Personal: Phone
Personal: Medical

Not very elegant, but it works.
Click to expand...

Not sure if this would be of any use to you but Entourage 2008 allows
you to used Saved Searches *within* other Saved Searches. You can get
pretty complex results from this.

The ultimate geek way of accomplishing your search, however, would be to
use the Raw Query function. This is a feature of Spotlight and is
accessible in Entourage at the bottom of the criteria drop down menu.

An example of the Raw Query you'd like to run would look like (this
should be all on one line but I'm breaking it into two to be easier to
read):

(com_microsoft_entourage_categories == "A" || "B") &&
(kMDItemDueDate == $time.today)

"==" mean "equal"
"||" means "or"
"&&" means "and"

Andy Ruff, a product manager for Entourage, wrote this article for
Spotlight support in Entourage 2004
<http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.22/22.05/Entourage2004SpotlightSupport/index.html>.

Hope this helps!

--

bill

William M. Smith, Microsoft Interop MVP - Mac/Windows
Entourage Help Page <http://entourage.mvps.org/>
Entourage Help Blog <http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/>
 
Top