F
fern
Hi,
Here's my problem - I hope you can understand it & help because I'
getting rather desperate for an answer:
Let's say I've got a column, A (or row 1, it doesn't matter) that
contains cells, each with a single word/category that I'm interested i
- we can assume that this is my list of category headers/titles.
Plus I've also got various other columns, A-D (or rows) next to my
column A titles that each contain a list of items, one per cell...
Hmm, that sounds confusing. Perhaps it would be clearer if I drew
it out (ignore the dashes, they're just there to keep my column
straight):
A(titles)------- B ---------- C ----------- D
dog------------fish---------bird--------- fish
cat ----------- dog --------gerbil--------cat
bird--------------------------cat--------------
fish--------------------------------------------
gerbil------------------------------------------
Now, rather than just sorting columns A-D alphabetically to get:
A---------------B----------- C----------- D
bird ----------dog---------bird----------cat
cat------------fish----------cat---------- fish
dog------------------------ gerbil-----------
fish-------------------------------------------
gerbil-----------------------------------------
...I actually want to sort B-D according to the original order of A so
that missing or empty (horizontal) categories are actually left blank,
rather than just collapsed into the smallest vertical list possible:
A----------------B----------C------------D
dog------------dog-----------------------
cat -------------------------cat---------cat
bird ------------------------bird----------
fish ------------fish---------------------fish
gerbil----------------------gerbil---------
Do you see what I mean? It's rather like sorting data into appropriate
bins before making a frequency histogram chart, but here I want t
sort
text into categories not numbers into bins, so . And nothing I'v
tried
so far seems to work, so I'd really appreciate any suggestions you can
give.
Thanks so much,
Here's my problem - I hope you can understand it & help because I'
getting rather desperate for an answer:
Let's say I've got a column, A (or row 1, it doesn't matter) that
contains cells, each with a single word/category that I'm interested i
- we can assume that this is my list of category headers/titles.
Plus I've also got various other columns, A-D (or rows) next to my
column A titles that each contain a list of items, one per cell...
Hmm, that sounds confusing. Perhaps it would be clearer if I drew
it out (ignore the dashes, they're just there to keep my column
straight):
A(titles)------- B ---------- C ----------- D
dog------------fish---------bird--------- fish
cat ----------- dog --------gerbil--------cat
bird--------------------------cat--------------
fish--------------------------------------------
gerbil------------------------------------------
Now, rather than just sorting columns A-D alphabetically to get:
A---------------B----------- C----------- D
bird ----------dog---------bird----------cat
cat------------fish----------cat---------- fish
dog------------------------ gerbil-----------
fish-------------------------------------------
gerbil-----------------------------------------
...I actually want to sort B-D according to the original order of A so
that missing or empty (horizontal) categories are actually left blank,
rather than just collapsed into the smallest vertical list possible:
A----------------B----------C------------D
dog------------dog-----------------------
cat -------------------------cat---------cat
bird ------------------------bird----------
fish ------------fish---------------------fish
gerbil----------------------gerbil---------
Do you see what I mean? It's rather like sorting data into appropriate
bins before making a frequency histogram chart, but here I want t
sort
text into categories not numbers into bins, so . And nothing I'v
tried
so far seems to work, so I'd really appreciate any suggestions you can
give.
Thanks so much,