[Novalug] OT: sorting spreadsheet columns

Stephen Cicirelli scicirelli@gmail.com
Wed Jul 2 09:17:55 EDT 2008


Actually, I sort a column on a regular basis while not sorting the rest of
the spreadsheet.  I have a list of sites, with the hub site at the top and
the spokes sites below all lined up in in 15 columns.  When we add a new
location or shutdown an office I just delete it or add it to the bottom and
sort that one column.  It provides me with an alphabetically listed column
while not messing up the auto counting I do using =countif() statements.

-Stephen


On 7/2/08, Jim Ide <jimsmaillists@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Spreadsheets are sometimes used as quick and dirty databases,
> although they were probably not intended to be used this
> way.  Many times, I have received emails with attached
> spreadsheets containing team rosters, club members, etc.
>
> Suppose you have a spreadsheet with the columns Last Name,
> First Name, Address, etc., and you want to sort the rows
> by Last Name.  If you click the Last Name column and select
> Sort from the menu, only the Last Name column will be sorted,
> and the other columns will remain unsorted.  This often
> surprises/confuses new spreadsheet users.  If you want the
> entire row to be sorted by Last Name, you must select the
> entire range and *then* sort by Last Name.  It seems to me
> (a database guy) that row-oriented database-style sorting
> as the default behavior is more useful and intuitive than
> column-oriented sorting, but I rarely use spreadsheets
> and haven't had to solve a problem in which this behavior
> would be helpful.  I asked several persons I consider to
> be spreadsheet gurus why you would want this, and asked
> them to give me an example of when sorting just one column
> without disturbing the other columns would be useful,
> but none could come up with an answer.
>
> Any ideas?
>
>
>
>
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