When you have a lot of different rows in your spreadsheet,
you may want to sort the data so that you can view it more easily.
Sorting can re-order things alphabetically, numerically, by date, or even by font color.
Depending on your preference, you can either sort
in the Home tab from the Sort & Filter drop-down
menu, or you can use the commands in the Data tab,
and these are the ones I'm going to be using.
In this example, I have a t-shirt order form, and
I'd like to sort it by Last Name.
Just select any cell in the column that you want
to sort,
and then click the Ascending command - it's the one that says A-Z.
You'll notice that when you sort the column, it
also reorders all of the
other columns, so that each row still has the correct information.
If we wanted these in reverse order, we could click the Descending command.
We could also sort it by Homeroom, which sorts it
numerically, or we could sort it by Date.
Now what if we wanted to sort this by T-Shirt Size?
If I click on the Ascending command, the
order will be Large, Medium, Small, X-Large because it's ordering them alphabetically.
It would be better if it went Small, Medium, Large, X-Large,
and for this we'll need to create a custom sort.
Click the Sort command, and this opens a dialog box.
And on the right, you can see that it's ordering from A to Z.
If you click on that and select Custom List, you'll be able to
type in the T-Shirt sizes in the order that you want.
So I'll type Small, Medium, Large, and X-Large.
And I'm pressing Enter after each one, and then
click Add.
Make sure that your list is selected over here,
and then click OK.
And now, it's ordered the way that we want.
The only problem with this is every other column
is completely out of order now.
What I would really like is if the Homerooms were
more organized within each size.
I can do this by sorting multiple levels.
This will let us sort first by T-Shirt size, and
then by Homeroom.
Click the Sort command.
And we want to Add a Level.
Then just select Homeroom, and then we'll leave
these the way they are.
When you click OK, you'll see that within each
T-Shirt size,
the Homerooms are in numerical order.
If we wanted to sort by Homeroom first and then by
T-Shirt size, we could go back to the Sort
command, and then select one of these rows, and
then use these arrows to change the order.
As you can see, there are a lot of different ways
of sorting your data,
depending on how you want to organize it.
So take some time to experiment with the different options to find the ones that best suit your
needs.