I was looking for a way to quickly search my e-mails and contacts in Outlook on my Tablet PC and found that Outlook does this well, let’s put it this way, rather slow… well, too slow for me and I am sure many others (I can only look at an hourglass for so long). Fresh from the MSN Sandbox (a place to play with new MSN technologies, look at prototypes, and peek behind the scenes at some of the new ideas at MSN) is a great new utility for lightning-fast searches for your e-mail, files, and desktop works with Microsoft Outlook called Lookout!

You can use Lookout to search:

E-mail messages
Contacts, calendar, notes, tasks, etc.
Data from exchange, POP, IMAP, PST files, Public Folders
Files on your computer or other computers

Just enter your search term in the toolbar in Outlook and press enter. Results are instantaneous. I was simply amazed at how quick this was and was wondering if this technology will hopefully trickle down to the rest of the Office suite and hopefully to the OS as well. Lookout seems to find the terms you are searching for nearly anywhere in your Outlook mailbox - subjects, bodies, phone numbers, addresses, and even files on your computer or those shared to your computer. If you are as impatient as I am, this utility is one that you won’t regret installing…

Note: In order to get this to work you will need to install the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1. This is also an unsupported tool so please use it at your own risk… and be sure to check out the support forums before installing or to provide feedback on your experience- good and bad.