How does "Search For" By or Subject work?

(This is a question about how to use the Forum; not how to use Excel. I know
it doesn't belong here. Please accept my apologies. I can't find any other
place to ask it and the Contact link at the bottom of the page appears to be
broken.)

The Help for the Forum says that Search For searchs the By and Subject
fields as well as the message bodies. I can't figure out how to search the By
and Subject fields. For example, I entered my first post on 2/19/2010 in the
Excel General Questions forum. My user id is "SVanDee". The Subject is "2007
Structured Reference auto-completion not working completely?". If I enter
"SVanDee" in the Search For box, Excel General Questions, Excel or Office in
the In box, and select Show All Threads, it says "Your query for "SVanDee"
did not return results.". If I enter "Structured References" in the Search
For box, it returns a bunch of threads with those words in the body of the
message but no threads with those words in the title. I've tried it with the
By and Subject from other posts with the same results. Does this just not
work or is some special syntax required?

A related question: Is there some way to tell Search For that it must find
the entire phrase with no intervening words? That is, I'd like to be able to
find just posts with the phrase "Structured References" but not all the posts
that have those two words anywhere in the message.

One way you could try .. just click on your own name "SVanDee" in your
posting. Then in the user profile pop up, click on "Recent posts by this
user" and you should get some useful results. Joy? hit YES below
--
Max
Singapore
---

Yes, that solves the how to search by post author. Thanks.

Any ideas how to search Subjects?
How to search for a complete phrase such as "Structured References" rather
than all messages that contain the words anywhere?

"Max" wrote:

One way you could try .. just click on your own name "SVanDee" in your
posting. Then in the user profile pop up, click on "Recent posts by this
user" and you should get some useful results. Joy? hit YES below
--
Max
Singapore
---

Any ideas how to search Subjects?
well, I'd guess the lack of any responses to your further query thus far
says it all. Try Google for specific searches, think it's a better engine
with more features for that purpose. Of course, I'd hope that your company
doesn't restrict access to Google, otherwise you'd need to do it at home.
--
Max
Singapore
---

Google Groups does seem to have a better search. Thanks for the suggestion.