How to jump from one letter to another in a field

[William_Coale]

Greetings! I’ve looked everywhere, but can’t find a way to jump from one letter to another in a column. I’ve just started a large research project, and have 1,110 entries, based upon LAST NAME. It would be fantastic if I could easily jump from where I am in the table to the beginning of the letter a new entry begins with, since I need to check for duplicate entries (not simply based on the last name…it’s more complicated than that).

I’m familiar with the search function, of course, but that takes FAR too much time. I can use the keyboard shortcuts to get to the top or bottom of the chart in a flash, but that doesn’t help me much when I have to look up and see what I have (if anything) for Molly Mergatroyd!

Thanks in advance for any ideas you can offer!!

[ScottWorld]

Welcome to the community, @William_Coale!

As far as I know, there is no direct way to jump to a specific part of your record list.

If you’re primarily looking to jump to the initial letter of the last name, I would recommend creating a formula field called “FIRST LETTER” with this formula:

LEFT({Last Name},1)

That will give you the first letter of the last name. Once you have created that formula field, then you can do all sorts of cool tricks.

For example, you can group your list by that formula field by using the “Group” button in the toolbar.

Once your records are grouped, you can also collapse or expand all your groups by clicking on the little options that say “Collapse All Groups” or “Expand All Groups”.

Once all your groups are collapsed, you only have 26 letters to look through. You can just scroll down to the letter you want and click on it to expand it.

Hope this helps! If this answers your question, could you please mark this comment as the solution to your question? This will help other people who have a similar question. :slightly_smiling_face:

[ScottWorld · Accepted solution]

And another trick you can use is the Search Block tool.

Setup the search block to only search on your new formula field. (That way, you’re only searching for the first letter of the last name.)

Then, type in the the letter that you’re looking for into the search block, and the search block will return to you a list of records that match that letter.

You can also make the search block open up as full screen, so you can see a bunch of records at once.

[William_Coale]

Thanks kindly!!! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: