Numbering, and then sorting by number

[paint771]

I have no idea why I can't figure this out.

I have a bunch of text. I can very easily highlight the whole bunch and
then number it as a list (just the Numbering button in the paragraph list).
No problem, now it's a list of 100 numbered paragraphs. The formatting is a
bit screwy (it's a bibliography), but there is clearly a 1, 2, 3, etc.

How do I THEN sort that list BY NUMBER? I just want to reverse the list by
the number.

Say I have 100 paragraphs. I want to ultimately reverse the order of those
paragraphs (so, the 100th paragraph being the first, 99th the second, and so
on). How can I do that? I am a reasonably smart guy, and this seems like it
should be a very easy thing to do (sort, by paragraph, by number, right?),
but good lord it ain't workin' for me.

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

Are you using automatic numbering? If so, then that's the problem. Word's
Sort feature sorts by actual text/numbers--automatic numbers aren't really
there. They're formatting that you apply. So, if you tell Word to sort a
numbered list, it will ignore the numbers and sort by the first text it sees
after the automatic numbering.

To do what you want, you'd need to convert the numbers into real numbers.
One way to do this would be to copy the list to the clipboard, then use
Paste Special to paste the list as unformatted text. This will convert the
numbers into actual numbers, and you should now be able to reverse sort by
number.

Herb Tyson MS MVP
Author of the Word 2007 Bible
Blog: http://word2007bible.herbtyson.com
Web: http://www.herbtyson.com

 

[paint771]

Okay, so I'm not crazy then. You can't sort by automatic numbering is what
you're saying. That sucks.

I understand the paste special thing, but then I lose all the formatting of
the text, which if I wanted to go that route I'd have just pasted it into
excel, sorted, and then back again to Word. So either I have to manually
resort all 100 paragraphs, or I have to manually reformat the text in all of
them. That about the size of it?



Brad

 

[Peter T. Daniels]

Convert the list into a table, add a second column, fill it with
consecutive numbers, reverse-sort on that column, delete that column,
and convert the table to text.