This post was written by MysticGeek, a technology blogger at the How-To Geek Blogs.

After viewing the project manager at the workplace scroll shateringly with 10,000 messages in her inbox trying to find one from the best sender, it struck me that a great deal of people don’t recognize exactly how conveniently you can make use of the key-board to find a message in a sorted listing.

Nearly any kind of listing control in Windows will let you kind the very first couple of letters in order to focus the option on the product that matches in the existing sorted column. It’s not precisely a new strategy, but going by today’s experience I felt it deserved sharing.

As an example, in Outlook you can arrange by the “From” header by clicking on it …

And now you can start typing the very first couple of letters of a name, for example I intended to locate messages from Amazon.com so I enter the very first three letters quickly: a, m, a.

You’ll see that the option decreased to Amazon.com. Clearly this is a contrived example, yet you can see the worth in using this technique.

Note: This will likewise benefit other columns like Subject, or anything that can be arranged in indexed order.