After watching the project manager at work scroll painfully through 10,000 messages in her inbox trying to find one from the right sender, it occurred to me that a lot of people don’t realize how easily you can use the keyboard to find a message in a sorted list.
Almost any list control in Windows will let you type the first couple of letters in order to focus the selection on the item that matches in the current sorted column. It’s not exactly a new technique, but judging from today’s experience I felt it was worth sharing.
For instance, in Outlook you can sort by the “From” header by clicking on it…
Note: This will also work for other columns like Subject, or anything that can be sorted in alphabetical order.
