Many people like to create shortcuts to their favourite programs and place them on their desktop, but it doesn't take long for the clutter to build up. When you get too many icons on the desktop it defeats the purpose, because now you have to visually search through all of them for the one you want. To make it worse, maybe you rearranged the icons and now they aren't sitting in the same place on the desktop that they used to occupy. It can be frustrating sometimes when the one you want just doesn't jump out at you. Here's a tip to make it easier. The shortcuts you created are stored by Windows as individual files in the "desktop" folder, so they each have a filename equivalent to the name of the shortcut. That's what makes it easy to jump to the one you want, or at least highlight only the ones that start with the same letter. This is actually a feature of the Windows Explorer.
Let's say for instance, that you have made shortcuts to programs called "Paintpro", "Photoshop" and "Printmaster". You already have about 30 other shortcuts on your desktop, so these ones just kind of get lost in the mess. All you want to do is find "Photoshop" without too much searching.
Well, you know that the one you want (Photoshop) starts with the letter "P", so just click once on an empty area of the desktop to make it the active window. Then press the "P" key on the keyboard. Each time you press the "P" key, the next desktop icon starting with "P" will be highlighted, making it easy for your eyes to pick out all the shortcut icons starting with "P" as the highlight jumps from one icon to the next. This procedure works equally well with other files in Windows Explorer. Just click on an empty area in the filename listing in Windows Explorer, then press the first letter of the filename you're looking for and the cursor or highlight will jump to the first occurrence of that letter. Each successive press of the same key will cause the highlight to move to the next name in the list that starts with that letter. It's a great time saver and a very easy way to pick the one you want out of the desktop clutter!