How to quickly sort data in Excel
Posted on May 3, 2009 at 5:48 am
How many times have you recieved an unsorted Excel worksheet? Probably a lot. And you certainly don’t wnat to sort the whole thing manually. If you are like Dexter Morgan who wants his grocery list alphabeticallt, then here’s an important tip that will make you more productive in Excel.
First, make a backup. Fire up Excel and backup your file by clicking Save As then enter a file name for your backup. After making a backup, click the section at the left side of the first row and column. This will select all cells in your sheet. You may also use Control-A to select all cells in an Excel spreadsheet.
Having everything selected, click the Data menu and then click Sort…
Enter the column names that you want to use as sorting variables. In the example, I have I used the column SEQ and DATE_TIME columns. I also chose the Ascending option to sort the the data by ascending SEQ and DATE_TIME data.
Click OK to sort the data. You should see the sheet sorted out on the chosen column names.
Excel automatically determines the data type of the columns – whether they are numbers, dates or strings – and will sort them for you.
As you can see, the steps for sorting data in Excel are fairly simple. The important step is to make sure everything is selected before you run sort. If you selected only one column, it will prompt you for with a Sort Warning.
If you chose to continue with the current selection, the selected column will get sorted but the other columns will not. Make sure you know that this could happen before you continue after seeing the Sort Warning screen. This is the reason why I always create a backup before I use advanced operations like sort.
I hope this tip helps you get more productive with Excel. If you want more Excel help, read my posts on how to use data validation in Excel, how to use the Conditional Sum Wizard, how to make a chart or graph in Excel, how to use VLOOKUP, and how to insert a image in an Excel header.
Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.
» Filed Under MS Office Tips
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3 Responses to “How to quickly sort data in Excel”
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Mr. Excel Says:
Can someone help me? I have to sort hundreds of Excel workbooks and I’m wondering if there is a way to create a shortcut so that I can just press one button or key and it would perform the sort the way I specify? Some way to record several keystrokes at once? Thanks
December 3rd, 2009 at 11:56 am
I love your tutorials, but you may need to proofread them, especially this page. There’s some typos. Also, in the “Microsoft Excel Basics Tutorial – Learning how to use Excel” page some of your pictures don’t load, even after I refresh multiple times. Thanks for the tutorials though, they are making re-learning Excel easy.
How can I sort by more than three columns? In the dialog, it only has Sort By three times, but what if I have to sort by one column, then another, then another, then another!? Thanks!