How can we lock all the data in each row for sorting?

[Guest]

We are ignorant.. and I apologize for such a trivial question.
I've been with this company for about 4 years, and we use excell for many
reasons and one is a log of customers job orders. name, date, part#, order#,
engr, dept, qty, description (in each row).
We continually add and update this spreadsheet.
The problem is sorting the data, maybe to see if a same item was used for
several customers.
THE PROBLEM IS: The columns get mixed up and don't go back to normal, say if
I were to click on the A column and put things back to normal (alphabetical
order, by customer).
Is there a way to freeze or lock all the data in each row across?
Dave
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Guest]

If you highlight the entire area and then Data->Sort you should be ok. One
suggestion is to use filtering, highlight the row with headers (usually the
1st) then Data->Filter->Autofilter. this will put drop arrows on all of the
headers and you can drop down and pick say an item, and it will pull all rows
that contain it.