Managing Data with Microsoft® Excel

Sorting Lists

This chapter wouldn't have insisted that you be so fastidious about structuring lists if there weren't plenty of good reasons. Many of those reasons have to do with data management, but they don't stop there.

The list first shown in Figure 3.1 is repeated in Figure 3.8. Suppose that you wanted to sort the list, first by Sex, and then by Party within Sex, and finally by Age within Party within Sex. You would click any cell inside the list—as shown in Figure 3.8, that might be C8 or B18—and choose Sort from the Data menu.

Figure 3.8. You can choose No Header Row if you're not sorting a true list: one without variable names, perhaps.

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In the first row of the range of contiguous cells, if Excel can find values ...