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Language: en

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Now that our database is fully populated with
the records it's time to talk about ways we

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can look at, or analyze, our data.

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Sorting is one very basic way to look at the
data.

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You sort data every single day.

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For example, A calendar sorts appointments
and activities or tracks birthdays by date;

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email can sort by who sent the email, the
date it was received, or the subject, and

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Excel spreadsheets sort data, too.

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Access lets you sort your records based on
any value or field from which you'd like to

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pull out specific information.

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We enter new books into the database as we
get them into our store which means they are

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not in any kind of order they aren't stored
alphabetically by title or author, and they

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aren't grouped according to their category.

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So how do you make them appear in some sort
of useful order?

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Let's say we want to see what categories of
books we have.

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We could scroll through the Books table to
see each record and note the category of each

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one, but that could take a long time if we
had hundreds or thousands of books in our

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database.

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Instead, we can sort the records based on
the category field so that all the records

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for a particular category are grouped together
for us.

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Now, we can do this in the Books table, or
using the Books form.

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First, let's look at sorting a text field;
we'll start by sorting the Category field

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in the Books table.

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You could do this from the Ribbon using one
of the Sort commands on the Sort & Filter

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command group, or it is easier to click on
the arrow at the top of the Category column.

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This brings up some options - the same options
you have in the Ribbon.

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The first two are your sorting options.

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The bottom options are filtering options.

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We'll cover these in another lesson.

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You can sort this text column alphabetically,
from A to Z or from Z to A.

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Now, when you want to clear the sort, you
have to do that from the Ribbon with the Clear

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All Sorts command - the one with the little
eraser icon.

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Let's sort on a numerical field this time
let's sort our books by price if we wanted

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to see what books are our most expensive,
for example.

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Select the drop down arrow at the top of the
Price column.

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You get a few options here, too, just like
you did when we sorted on category.

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But, notice that the sort options are now
numerical.

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That is because this field was set up with
a data type of currency, which is a numerical

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value.

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We get to decide what order we want, smallest
to largest, or largest to smallest.

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Let's choose largest to smallest, so the most
expensive book appears first for each category

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grouping.

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What if we want to do a multi-level sort like
you can do in Excel?

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Well, Access can do a multi-level sort, but
the results can turn out very differently

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than you expect, so we recommend that if you
want to sort based on more than one field,

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that you either do an advanced filter which
we'll cover in the next lesson or write a

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query for that.

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We'll get to both filtering data and queries
in later lessons.

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Sorts pull some very basic information out
of your database for you.

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Our next lesson will show you how to filter
the data in a table.