In the mood of fall cleaning and to celebrate having gotten my office organized, I'm going to blog this week about sorting. Today, it's just basic run-of-the-mill sorting using the sorting icons on the toolbar.
Let's say you've just got this list, and you want to sort it alphabetically.
Select it, without selecting any data you don't want sorted.
Click either the A-Z or Z-A icon.
You get your results.
Be sure not to select any headings, i.e. the word Employee in this case, or you get this result, which you don't want.
What if you have something like this, though? Something with multiple columns.
Here's the thing. Selecting, say, the 2000 column and clicking a sort icon will NOT give you good results. It will sort just the data in the 2000 column and leave all the other data behind. So all of a sudden your data is wrong.
You cannot specify the column to sort by, using the simple sort icons. That's covered in my next blog entry on sorting.
Here's what you can do. You can sort by the first column in the data set. You select ALL the data, again without the headings.
You click the sort icon you want.
And you get your results; the data is sorted by the first column. That's your only choice.
If you had selected just one column, the data would be goofed up. 
For more control over sorting, tune in for the next sorting blog.
How about sorting a row instead a column... it does not work.
Posted by: Percy | December 31, 2008 at 05:55 PM
I want to sort several books
alphabetically but cannot find icons as you describe above on
my "office".
Am I missing them on my program?
Posted by: Mary | February 19, 2009 at 10:18 PM