Oct 28, 2009

Outlook 2007 Search Stopped Working. Now What?

I love when you make a change on the network, then immediately afterward every little problem comes up and people want to know if it was because of the change you did. Sometimes it most definitely is, but other times it is completely unrelated. I just finished a project with Exchange 2007, and right afterward , amazingly, one of our executives lost his ability to search using Outlook 2007.

Most often, this is caused when an Office 2003 product, like Front page for instance, gets installed after Office 2007. The 2003 Office install breaks the Windows desktop search component that Outlook 2007 uses. So how do you fix it when you need both Office 2007, and the one 2003 Office product? Actually, it is pretty easy, just time consuming.

  • First, close out of all Office Applications
  • Do a repair on Office 2007 by going to Start > Control Panel> Add/Remove Programs (Or Programs and Features in Vista and Windows 7), find Office 2007 and select Change, then Repair.
  • Once the repair is done, rebuild your index by going to Start > Control Panel> Indexing Options > Advanced> and clicking on Rebuild.

Once you do both of those steps, your search should start working again in Outlook. If this doesn't correct the issue, then you probably will have to re-create the user's Outlook profile.

Did this tip work for you? Did you have to do something else? Let us know about your results in the comments!



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