Outlook 2010: Advanced Find Contact Search Issue

I have recently upgraded to Outlook 2010. I have come up with the problem that the word searching on it doesn't support wildcard. So if you use Outlook 2010 Advance Find to search "mar", you will not have "Amar" in the list. The regular Find works and gives you all the other possibilities but you will not have words containing those alphabets. This was not the case with my earlier version of Outlook. So does that mean there is some bug with this version of Microsoft Outlook? How can I fix this ?

It happens if you have misconfiguration on your Outlook 2010. Make sure Advanced Find if Time field is having the value of "Received" and date range is "This Month", "Search for the Word(s)" field is blank and you are entering a name in the "From" field. All you have to do is change the Time drop-down to "None". Once you do this, the search will automaitcally find words matching the text. Also check if Windows Search is turned off.

I think its the problem of your profile and not the Outlook or something else. To confirm this try to create a new profile and see if this helps. Go to Start - Control Panel and click on Mail. Click Show Profiles, select "Prompt for a profile to be used". Click Add button. Provide a new name to the profile, and then click OK. Launch Outlook and select this new profile. If the problem disappears then clearly indicates that your old Outlook profile got corrupted. Delete that profile.

Its actually because of the limitation of Instant search. The time consumed by the index would be too much if it will do partial word searches. Basically the Instant Search is not the same as in its older versions. In Outlook 2010, instant search uses the windows desktop search engine. This is the main reason why it is more faster than its previous version. So if you want to search for "Amar" (as in your case), you can type something like "am" or something similar. The instant search can add wildcards at the end of the phrase or alphabets that you enter but will not add it before that. So you will not get the benefit of Advanced Find in Outlook 2010 until the instant search index feature is enabled.

Outlook 2010 has a hidden feature known as Query Builder that defines more complex and confine criteria to perform advance search. To enable this, exit Outlook 2010. Go to Start and type regedit in the Search box and press Enter. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook. On the left pane, right click on Outlook folder and click New and then Key. Name it QueryBuilder and close the registry editor. Now you have to add the Advance Find command. For this click on File - Options - Customize Ribbon. Select All commands from the drop down list, and search for "Advance Find…". Click on Home and then New Group. Type the name as Advance Search, and then click Add. Click OK. Go to Home tab, click Advance Find. You will then see a new tab with the name QueryBuilder in Advance Find dialog box.