Mac: how to search outlook (hotmail) contact notes?

Copper Contributor

All my contacts are in my hotmail account, which syncs to iphone, android devices, pc.  On the mac I have been using outlook for 10 years, as outlook for mac offers unified inbox.

 

About a year ago, search in outlook simply stopped working completely. Spotlight works fine.  I spent some days with microsoft support, and they said this was a known issue, and would never be fixed - I have to use the "new look" version instead.

 

The problem is:

  1. the new look version is unusable still, so i end up switching between old version (to send emails etc), and the new version (to search).
  2. the new version doesn't search contacts notes, it only searches the contact names. I have around 2000 contacts, and most have notes.  

 

I need to find a way to search outlook contact notes.

 

I guess the real solution is to bin outlook, as it's not usable any more if you have many addresses (e.g. if you want to put an email address in the to: which is stored in a different account, new look outlook can't find it, so you cant send the email).

 

Until I find a usable email client / contact manager, does anyone have any ideas how to search my hotmail and/or outlook contacts?  I guess I need to export then to CSV every time I want to lookup a contact.  Maybe there is a 3rd party cross platform contact manager I could use?  Or should I put all my contacts into gmail?   Anyone else have this issue?

 

Pre M1 Mac, I would have considered switching back to PC.  Living without unified inbox and 12 accounts would have been crippling, but at least search would have worked.  But now M1 macs are here, PC is not really a good option for laptops at least.

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HAve you found a solution?