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Excel, a most under used application. Tips that you can use, sorting

by Tris Hussey on October 3rd, 2006

Alrighty.  Let’s roll up our sleeves and get into some Excel fun and goodies.  As I introed in the series index, I’m going to talk about sorting, Auto-filtering, and Pivot tables over the course of three posts.  First up sorting …

Yeah, I know Excels sorts stuff.  They even have those spiffy auto-sort (ascending and descending) buttons on the toolbar.  But what if you have a list of clients.  For the sake of discussion say you have names, product purchased, and amount spent in four columns (and let’s also say that you have headers on those columns so you don’t have to guess, okay?).  Now what if you need an alphabetical list of clients.  Easy right?  Select all the clients, hit your sort button and bingo bango you’ve got it.  As long as you’ve selected all the columns of data, everything is nice and cool.  Now, what if you’d like an alphabetical list of clients, sorted first by product, then amount spent, then name.  Oh, that’s hard.  Nope!  It’s smashingly easy!

First, select all the data, including the headers (the names of the columns like First name, last name, product, etc).  Then from the Data menu choose Sort … Now the fun begins.  If you have selected the header names, make sure that you have the Header row radio button checked.  Then just simply pick the order to sort (say Product, Amount spent, then Last name) and for each one choose the direction (maybe show big spenders first, so pick that one as descending).  Click okay and you’re done!

Yep that easy.  And fast too.  From this list, you’re now able to see who spent the most, on what product, and who.  Don’t like the sort?  Control-z … undo.

That’s it for now … next post: Auto-filter.

Tags: MS Office, MS Excel, Excel tips and tricks, PimpYourWork, PYW

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POSTED IN: Excel, MS Office, Software tips, Time savers