Sorting Information in OpenOffice Writer Tables

 

A table of ten or so rows is easy to find information in.

A table of ten pages—that's harder.

To make things easier on yourself, you might want to sort the information. Here's how to do it. (This procedure actually kind of works with regular lists, but not very well. Tables are better.)

Here's the table I'll use as an example. (Imagine it's incredibly long, so that the time we'll save and convenience provided will be immense.)

Select the table, including the headings.

Choose Table > Sort. You'll see this window. It looks really techy and complicated, which it is, but I'll point out the really important stuff.

This part is very important. Be sure that you select Row where indicated. This means that it is the rows of information that will be re-ordered. However, you're sorting by a particular column, like the Name or Postal Code column, and Column will show up elsewhere in the window where you do the actual sorting. It's kinda stupid and complicated, but you'll get used to it.

Now you select the column to sort by. Leave Key1 selected, then specify the column you want to sort by (might be Firstname, but you just select the number). Also select the type of data, Alphanumeric or Numeric. If you're sorting by numbers, you MUST select Numeric. Then select the order: Ascending (A-Z, 1-9) or Descending (Z-A, 9-1).

Click this image to see it a bit bigger.

If you want to sort by two columns, such as by state and then by last name, for instance, then you'll want to use the Key 2 options. For Key 2, select the column to sort by, the type of data, and the order, Ascending or Descending.

Click OK.

There you are, all sorted.

 

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Comments

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GOOD

[Shinoj]

Thanks for the detailed step by step tutorial for the sorting of tables. It was really a good tip of information.