Ahoy Cearbhall
Many thanks for your instruction. It works fine when not in a table. However,
my list of names are in a table, in which, there are four other columns
containing numbers attached to each name.
I selected the column with the list of names, did the Control H and replaced
the “Spaces” with “Tabs”. Then I tabbed looking for “OK” but no OK to be found.
When I arrived at “Replace”, I pressed “Enter” and that let me out.
I then went to the “Home Tab” and tabbed down to “Paragraph”. I continued to
tab until I got to “Sort” and pressed “Enter”. I’m afraid in here, it didn’t do
what it said on the can! When I arrived on “Paragraph” I arrowed up and down
but going nowhere. Jaws kept saying paragraph & I got a Bing sound each time.
Any further instruction would be appreciated.
Kind regards.
Yours Aye
Seán
From: vip_students-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <vip_students-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On
Behalf Of Cearbhall O'Meadhra
Sent: 11 February 2019 23:30
To: vip_students@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [vip_students] Re: Fwd: Sort the contents of a table - Office Support
Sean,
I agree that it is difficult to follow what the video describes if you are not
familiar with what he is illustrating.
I thought it might help if I set it out step by step for you here:
I have prepared a sample word list in which the first name and surname of each
person is separated by a single space and the surname is separated from the
date of birth by another space.
Sean’s word list
John smith 25/05/2016
Fred Livingston 03/03/2002
Amy Wilson 05/12/2015
Eilis Maguire 01/14/2014
Peter Wilson 22/02/2002
Mary Maguire 25/12/2012
Although this list is not a table and is only a block of text, the video
describes a quick way to sort this block of names and dates of birth by making
them temporarily look like a table.
To achieve this, each of the three words (counting the dates as a word) need to
be separated by a tab character.
First we need to change each space into a tab.
Press control-h to open the Find and Replace dialog.
Type a space in the Find field;
Keep pressing tab until you come to “special menu” and press enter to open it.
A list of special characters opens with The tab character in the second row.
Press enter on the tab character.
you will see that it is now in the replace field.
Tab to OK and complete the change. Now you will see that there are tab
characters where the spaces were before between the words.
Now we are ready to tell Word that this is a table.
Select the full list making sure that all the text is highlighted.
Press the left alt key and open the home ribbon by pressing down-arrow on the
word Home. Keep pressing tab until you come to the words “paragraph Group” it
may take a number of repeated presses of the tab key to get there! Keep
pressing the tab key a few more times until you hear “Sort” and press Enter to
open the sort dialog.
You will see that this offers a number of choices. You will need to use the
arrow keys to select what you need.
As soon as the Sort dialog opens you are offered a list of words starting with
the word “Paragraph” you need to arrow down to “Field 2” and this sets the sort
order to begin with the second column which is the Surname field.
Now tab to the next prompt which is “text” so leave that alone and move to the
next field which tells the sort whether to sort ascending or descending. It
defaults to Ascending so you can leave it alone as well.
Next we come to the “Then By” field. You will need to move the arrow key up and
down here to get it to say “Field1” which is the First Name field.
Again the sort type and order are below and you can leave them unchanged.
Tab to OK and the sort is complete!
The final step is to remove the tab characters and restore the spaces which you
took out at the beginning. This is, again, done with the “Find and replace”
dialog.
Make sure the whole block is still highlighted.
Press control -H to open the Find and Replace dialog. You will see that the
find field still contains the space (it may seem blank but it does have the
space character in it). The tab character is still in the replace box.
Cut the tab character from the replace box and paste it into the find box.
Now type a space character into the replace box
and
tab to OK.
Now you are done and the text looks like it did originally but is sorted by
Surname and the First Names are sorted in ascending order within the Surname.
When you do this exercise once, you will see that it is quite quick and easy
even though it takes a long time to describe.
Let me know if this is any easier than the video!
All the best,
Cearbhall
m +353 (0)833323487 Ph: _353 (0)1-2864623 e: cearbhall.omeadhra@xxxxxxx
<mailto:cearbhall.omeadhra@xxxxxxx>
