Sorting

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'Sorting' topic. Click the article's title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

Controlling Sorting Order
When you sort information in a worksheet, you have control over the order in which that information is sorted. Here's a quick discussion of the ways that you can affect the sorting order.

Creating a Sort Order
If you have special sorting needs, Excel can help you out. It will even allow you to create custom non-standard sorting orders. This tip explains how you can do that, and how that feature can benefit the work you do.

Determining Sorting Criteria
If you need to know how a range of data is sorted, the task is not as easy as you might at first think. This tip examines why such determinations are difficult and how you can go about trying to figure out the criteria.

Fixing Odd Sorting Behavior
When you sort data that contains both numbers and text, you may not get exactly the result that you expected. To know what is going on, you have to know how Excel views your data.

Ignoring Selected Words when Sorting
If you use Excel to maintain a list of text strings (such as movie, book, or product titles), you may want the program to ignore certain words when sorting that list. This can't be done automatically, but there are ways to get your list in the order you want.

Incomplete and Corrupt Sorting
Using the sorting tools, on the toolbar, may result in some unwanted results, such as jumbled data. If this happens to you, the best thing to do (as described in this tip) is to figure out exactly what is being sorted by Excel.

Non-standard Sorting
Information in a cell can be entered using line feeds, which results in multiple lines of data in the same cell. If you later want to sort that information, there are a couple of ways you can approach the problem.

Performing Complex Sorts
Most sorting tasks in Excel are straightforward and simple. Excel has a very robust sorting capability, however, provided that you know how to take advantage of it. This tip explains the various ways you can perform more complex sorts of a portion of a data list.

Recognizing a Header Row when Sorting
Excel provides a couple of ways you can sort the information in a worksheet. Before sorting, it pays to know whether Excel will recognize your header row properly or not. This tip explains how you can figure out this critical information.

Sorting a Range of Cells
When you sort data in a worksheet, you don't need to sort everything at once. You can sort just a portion of your data by using the techniques in this tip.

Sorting an Entire List
The quickest way to sort a list is to use the sorting tools on the toolbar. It is helpful, however, to know how these tools affect your data.

Sorting by Colors
Excel allows you to sort by the data within a list, but it doesn't allow you to inherently sort by cell color. This tip shows you how to overcome that shortcoming, providing a macro that makes sorting by cell color a snap.

Sorting by Columns
Excel has a variety of ways to sort the information in a worksheet.

Sorting by Fill Color
Sorting data in a worksheet is easy, unless you want to sort by the color used to fill a range of cells. There are ways to do the sorting, however, as illustrated in this tip.

Sorting by Five Columns
Excel allows you to sort but up to three columns, but you may want to sort by more than that. This tip provides ways you can get the desired sorted data.

Sorting Data Containing Merged Cells
When formatting the layout of your worksheet, Excel allows you to easily merge adjacent cells together. This can cause havoc later, however, since you can't sort ranges that contain merged cells. This tip provides some guidance on how you can get around this limitation.

Sorting Dates by Month
Do you need to sort information in a worksheet by month name when all you have available in a column is a group of dates? You can do so by applying any of the techniques described in this tip.

Sorting Decimal Values
Government and industrial organizations often use a numbering system that relies upon a number both before and after a decimal point. Sorting these numbers properly can be a bother; here's some ideas.

Sorting Huge Lists
Got a huge amount of data you need to sort in a worksheet, but Excel doesn't seem to be sorting it correctly? Here's some great information on why this may be happening and what you can do about it.

Sorting Letters and Numbers
If you have data that includes a mixture of letters and numbers in the same cells, you may wonder why Excel sorts that data a particular way. This tip explains the sorting and what you can do to get more logical results.

Sorting or Filtering by Conditional Format Results
Conditional formatting is a great feature in Excel. Unfortunately, you can't sort or filter by the results of that formatting. Here's why.

Sorting while Ignoring Leading Characters
If you have a large list of information that needs to be sorted while ignoring the first characters in the sort key, performing the sort can seem perplexing. The answer is to create your own key column and then do the sorting as desired.

Sorting Worksheets
This VBA macro will sort all of the worksheets in a workbook by worksheet name.

Sorting ZIP Codes
If you have both five- and nine-digit ZIP Codes in a column, you may have noticed that they don't sort properly. The problem is related to how Excel treats the data, either numerically (five-digit codes) or as text (nine-digit codes). This tip explains how you can get the desired sorting results.

Too Many Formats when Sorting
Sorting is one of the basic operations done in a worksheet. If your sorting won't work and you instead get an error message, it could be because of the number of custom formats in your workbook. This tip provides information to help get rid of this problem.

Understanding Ascending and Descending Sorts
Excel allows you to easily sort data in either ascending (small to large) or descending (large to small) order. The way that each type of sort affects your data depends, primarily, on the characteristics of the data being sorted. This tip explains, in detail, how your data will look after sorting.