Creating your own order to sort with: leaving alphanumeric in the dust

I've been blogging about sorting for a while:

• Easy sorting
• Standard, more powerful sorting
• Sorting by a custom sort order

There's just one more thing to mention: creating your own custom sort order.

Existing sort orders are things like Monday Tuesday Wednesday (the right order, which is not alphabetical). But let's say you've got things you want in a certain logical but non-alphabetical order that aren't already set up in OpenOffice.org: titles of books or people, procedures done in a certain order, or your own abbreviations for the days of the week. You can create sort orders for those very easily so you can sort by them.

Let's say you've got this data.

This is the right order. If you had them out of order, though, and wanted to sort them, all you'd have the option for is alphabetic. Which isn't right. So you create an order to sort them by.

Select just the content of the sort order, nothing else. Be sure it's in the order you want it.

Choose Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org  Calc > Sort Lists.

Now just click Copy.

The list will appear. Click OK.

Now just sort the way you would with a custom sort order. You'll see your new sort order in the sort window.

Sort orders are nice for quick data entry, too. If you type the first word for a sort order, then find the small black handle in the lower right corner of the cell and drag, you'll be able to easily fill the cells with the rest of the content in the sort order.

Type the first word

Find the black handle and drag (magnified to show the handle)

The data will fill in each cell you drag through, in the order set up in the sort list.

Comments

[Bill Harris]

You mean all those second sheets with collating sequence tables carefully entered and looked up on the primary sheet to sort on indices instead of words wasn't necessary?!?

Thanks! I'll remember this the next time I do one.

[Solveig Haugland]

Hi Bill,

;>

I'm sure your second sheets with collating sequence tables were lovely.

Solveig

[Josh]

I have a problem sorting multiple rows [across] using Sort > Data menu. It only sorts the 1st row but not the rest.

e.g
before sorting-
row 1= 89, 90, 2, 23
row 2= 9, 34, 20, 90

after sorting-
row 1= 2, 23, 89, 90
row 2= 20, 90, 9, 34

How can i sort multiple rows?

[John-Christopher]

Also pictures are not sorted, which sucks.

[Solveig]

Hi Josh,

Sorry for the enormous delay. Did you select all the rows and under the Options tab in the sort window, indicate whether you had headings or not?

Solveig

[DBram]

Hello,

I need help please. I have searched and searched to no avail. How can I set the column headers to Sort By when clicked on?

Without having to select the entire data-range and go through the Data--> Sort-->, etc.

Thank you in advance.

Dan

[Martin Sykora]

Good post!!

[Alan Powell]

Hi, How do I go about sorting time?
I have...
15/3/10 1.15pm
15/3/10 11.30am
15/3/10 2.15pm
I'm sorting by date and then by time but I would like am to come before pm.
Will I have to resort to 24hour time?