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Forum home » Delegate support and help forum » Microsoft Excel Training and help » microsoft.excel.training - Sorting the data
microsoft.excel.training - Sorting the data
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Mon 1 Oct 2007, 11:14Delegate Fazil said...
Fazil has attended:
Excel Advanced course
Sorting the data
Hello,
My question is not 'just sorting' the data. I know to do that by Data - Sort and also by Filtering data.
In my data base, information is stored month-wise. It is easy for me find all the data of any particular month by just 'sorting' them. The problem is thay are not in order. Example, there will be an April data and after that a March followed my a May data.
So, when I need a print out of all the data in month order, it is not possible. When I fliter and sort them, it does 'ascending' or 'descending' and neither of them gets the months in order.
I want to know how I could sort all the data in proper month order, starting from January and ending with December.
Could you help..?
Thanks and regards,
Fazil
Mon 1 Oct 2007, 15:37Trainer Carlos said...
RE: Sorting the data
Hi Fazil
It sounds like the dates you are sorting are not in DATE format otherwise if you sorted dates they would be in order from 1 Jan to 31 Dec.
If your dates have been entered as text eg.
"Jan 07"
"Mar 07" (Note the " indicates it was entered, or its formatted as text
"Apr 07"
and you sort them they will be in Alphabetical order.
If this is true you need to reformat your dates before sorting
Hope this helps
Regards
Carlos
Mon 1 Oct 2007, 15:44Delegate Fazil said...
RE: Sorting the data
Hi Carlos,
Thanks for your quick reply. Yes, the data is entered just with the month (eg: May, June etc)
And the data is entered by lots of people from different departments.
Isn't there anyway I could get it sorted from January running to December without any change in the current data format.
Thanks and regards,
Fazil
Mon 1 Oct 2007, 15:52Trainer Carlos said...
RE: Sorting the data
Fazil
The simple answer is No. Text will always sort A, B,C etc
The only way to get around it would be to either enter the months as
1 Jan
2 Feb
3 Mar
etc
Or add another column with these numbers and sort it by that.
Regards
Carlos
Mon 1 Oct 2007, 16:51Delegate Paul said...
RE: Sorting the data
Extra to that, instead of having to type in a number for every single row, you could create a table in a different sheet and link the data using vlookup
in a different sheet, create a table that has numbers 1-12 in rows and in the cells next to them type Jan Feb Mar etc
then you can insert a column in your main table and say =vlookup(B2,Sheet2!A:B,2,0) then drag the formula down the column
that'd save you typing in all the numbers loads of times if you have thousands of entries
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