chronological order by dates in Word

[Guest]

I am working on a word document for college and am trying to put a list of
presdents in chronological order but when I try and do it with the tables,
sort option it wont do it...what am I doing wrong? can anyone help me? It
will let me put the names in order but not the dates

 

[Robert M. Franz (RMF)]

Hi abbymae

I am working on a word document for college and am trying to put a list of
presdents in chronological order but when I try and do it with the tables,
sort option it wont do it...

at this point, it's always expected to write what happens contrary to
your expectation ...

what am I doing wrong? can anyone help me? It
will let me put the names in order but not the dates

this is best achieved if you have the date in a separate column, and in
ISO format:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iso_date#Calendar_date

HTH
Robert

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

The sort you are performing is an "alphabetic" sort.

You need to express the dates in such a way that the individual characters
will sort in sequence, remembering that in an alphabetic sort spaces,
commas, hyphens and slashes are all significant sortable characters.

So 1 January 1980 will sort as "1 space j" whereas January 1, 1970 will sort
as "jan". In those examples, the year is the least significant thing.

Robert is suggesting that you use an ISO-standard date: 19800124 is 24th
January, 1980 and it will sort perfectly in sequence providing all other
dates are expressed in the same format.

Alternatively, tip your table into Excel and define the date column as a
"Date". Excel then expresses each date as the number of days since January
1, 1900 and sorts them as integer numbers. There's less chance of error,
and you can choose to have the date *displayed* in any format you like,
while internally it remains a single integer.

Hope this helps

I am working on a word document for college and am trying to put a list of
presdents in chronological order but when I try and do it with the tables,
sort option it wont do it...what am I doing wrong? can anyone help me? It
will let me put the names in order but not the dates

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Stefan Blom]

If the data is in a table, you can sort the rows based on the contents
of a column. Note that you have to specify "Date" for the "Type" of
sort (in the Sort dialog box). This seems to work reliably, even if
different date formats are used.

--
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP


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