Report Filters by name

Is there any way to create filters with a free form text box instead of a drop down? This is quite frustrating when you have to scroll through tons of choices to get to the customer / project / GL Account / employee / etc that you want to filter on. Furthermore, since the drop down lists are sorted by ID number, the order can be completely illogical (instead of perhaps alphabetical by name). Does anyone know how to achieve this? If there were just a text box, then you could perhaps type in %john% or %company abc% etc to