Excel® 2013 In Depth

20. Sorting Data

Sorting data is one of the key capabilities of a spreadsheet program such as Excel. With a click of the mouse, you can rearrange data so that it is presented in an alphabetical sequence or in a sequence with the largest numbers at the top or bottom of a list of data.

One of the considerations when sorting is what happens when there are ties in the column on which the sort is based. If you have a database of product sales and sort the data by the product field, you will likely have many rows with identical products. In that case, you can specify a secondary sort criteria. You might want to have Excel sort the records so that the sales date is to be used to sequence records when there is a tie in the product field. In this case, ...