COMPUTER TIPS & ARTICLES

Sorting Columns in Excel

Sorting column information in Excel is a powerful way to see the information you need the most, quickly and efficiently. Here's how to do it...

Let's say you have a spreadsheet containing sales people and their sales figures for each month of the year. It may look something like this:

Sales Person January February March
John	10000	25000	18000
Mary	23000	18700	15000
Harry	65000	45000	36000

Obviously you would be working with a lot more data than the small table listed above. You could sort each of the month columns from largest to smallest or smallest to largest, depending on what information you wanted to know.

To sort the columns you would simply click on the Data item in the Excel menu and click on Sort. You'll then get a window that asks how you'd like to sort your spreadsheet. You'll see options for Sort By and then a choice of ascending or descending. Use the drop-down menu to choose the column you'd like to sort. Then choose either Ascending or Descending and press OK. The column you chose is immediately sorted in either descending or ascending order, depending on the option you chose. You can also sort multiple columns by using the additional Then by lines provided in the Sort window. So you could sort the January column in descending order, then the February column and finally the March column as well.

Sorting columns allows you to extract information that might not be obvious otherwise. For example, which month had the highest sales? Which salesperson brought in the most sales in March? This sorting technique also works with other types of spreadsheets such as accounting figures, employee payroll and the like.