How do I create a custom (text) sort order in Word? in Word Tables    |   |  Help   Search For:     In:   Office   Word     Word General Questions     Word New Users     Word Application Errors     Word Drawing and Graphics     Word Mailmerge and Fax     Word Page Layout     Word Programming     Word Tables              CherylH 7/24/2007 11:31 AM PST   Question   I need to create a custom sort order in Word. My values are in text format. I do NOT want the sort to be ascending or descending, I want it to be specific. Is there any way I can do this? Here are my values and how I want the table to sort: Not Started Active Transferred Completed     Was this post helpful to you?         Reply |   Top           Jay Freedman 7/24/2007 1:45 PM PST   Answer   You can't literally create a custom sort order, as that's not supported. What you can do is insert a temporary column in the table, and put numeric or alphabetic "tags" in the cells of that column to represent the values to sort. For example, put an A in the temp column wherever Not Started appears, B wherever Active appears, and so on. This can be done by a macro if you have a lot of rows, or if you need to sort often. Then sort on the temporary column, and finish up by deleting that column. -- Regards, Jay Freedman Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. CherylH wrote: > I need to create a custom sort order in Word. My values are in text > format. I do NOT want the sort to be ascending or descending, I want > it to be specific. Is there any way I can do this? > > Here are my values and how I want the table to sort: > > Not Started > Active > Transferred > Completed     Was this post helpful to you?         Reply |   Top           SueT 8/11/2007 3:02 PM PST   A simpler solution, which I use, is to number the values in the order in which they should appear. Thus I would use: 1. Not Started 2. Active 3. Transferred 4. Completed I suppose you could use Search & Replace, after sorting, to remove the number, punctuation and space at the beginning of each value should it be unacceptable for them to appear in the finished document. -- SueT "Jay Freedman" wrote: > You can't literally create a custom sort order, as that's not supported. > > What you can do is insert a temporary column in the table, and put numeric > or alphabetic "tags" in the cells of that column to represent the values to > sort. For example, put an A in the temp column wherever Not Started appears, > B wherever Active appears, and so on. This can be done by a macro if you > have a lot of rows, or if you need to sort often. > > Then sort on the temporary column, and finish up by deleting that column. > > -- > Regards, > Jay Freedman > Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org > Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so > all may benefit. > > CherylH wrote: > > I need to create a custom sort order in Word. My values are in text > > format. I do NOT want the sort to be ascending or descending, I want > > it to be specific. Is there any way I can do this? > > > > Here are my values and how I want the table to sort: > > > > Not Started > > Active > > Transferred > > Completed > > >     Was this post helpful to you?         Reply |   Top           Peter Twydell 8/12/2007 11:48 AM PST   In message <6B127FF6-C888-4611-ACA7-AA8560BE9EA5@microsoft.com>, SueT <Sue@spamsink.co.uk> writes >A simpler solution, which I use, is to number the values in the order in >which they should appear. Thus I would use: > >1. Not Started >2. Active >3. Transferred >4. Completed > >I suppose you could use Search & Replace, after sorting, to remove the >number, punctuation and space at the beginning of each value should it be >unacceptable for them to appear in the finished document. You could also make the sort key hidden. I use this method for address labels, inserting the sort field (usually a surname) as hidden text in front of the printable text. One advantage is that you don't have to delete anything after the sort, and it's still there if you add other data in between. -- Peter Ying tong iddle-i po!     Was this post helpful to you?         Reply |   Top         Return to Microsoft Communities   Notify me of replies