Outlook is a popular email and calendar program. It’s easy to use and can be used on your desktop or laptop. However, sometimes you may need to find messages quickly in Outlook. Here are some tips to help you find messages quickly in Outlook:

  1. Open Outlook and click the three lines in the top left corner of the screen. This will show all of your current messages.
  2. Scroll down and click on the message that you want to find. This will take you to a page where you can see all of the information about that message, such as its sender, time stamp, and subject line.
  3. To search for a specific message, type its name into the search bar at the top of the page and hit enter. For example, if you want to find all messages from John Doe, type “John Doe” into the search bar and hit enter.

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.