EDIT: found ok solution - see note below my main text.
Original Question: I have a project with a little town consisting of many buildings. I merged them together as one object for easy posing. Now, I want to change the roof color on one building. I separated that one building to be its own object again (P to seParate) but now if I select that lone building and open the materials tab, there are hundreds of materials that show up. I can’t find the material that is the roof that I want. So, basically, I need to know how to find one discreet object’s material and jump to it in the materials panel. Is there a way to select a face or vertex in edit mode, and then hit some button and have the materials panel auto-open only the material(s) for those faces or verticies? It seems that if select an object, I should be able to easily see only those materials that are associated with that selection and nothing else. I’ve used Blender for more than 15 years, and I still find this insanely unintuitive and baffling.
EDIT - so it looks like after selecting a face, I can use the “Select” button to pretty much do what I wanted. If this is the best way to do this, then feel free to delete my post.