sorting error on non-merged cells

  • Thread starter Thread starter Millard Cohen
  • Start date Start date
M

Millard Cohen

Excel 2002, WinXp Home

My spreadsheet has columns for Number, Date, Text, etc.
When I select a column to sort, Excel expands the
selection to include all cells (as it should). When I try
to sort I get the error message about merged cells having
to be the same size. I looked at KB291063 but that
doesn't help. The cels are NOT merged so why do they have
to be the same size? What size is the error refering to
(# of characters, absolute value, ?)? How do I un-merge
non-merged cells so I can sort?
 
Firstly I would never rely on Excel to expand a selection to include the data I
want. I would always make sure I had selected it to start with, as that way
there is no ambiguity, and hopefully no surprises.

Re your problem though, try selecting the whole raea you wish to sort, and then
doing Format / Cells / Alignment and see if there is a greyed out tick in the
'Merge Cells' option. if so then this means that you do have at least one
merged cell in there. Just tick and then untick this option and hit OK. Having
done this though, before you do anything else, take a quick look at the data and
make sure you didn't just blow something away by doing that.
 
"Merge Cells" was NOT greyed out. I manually selected the
area to be sorted and had two different results. When I
did the entire spreadsheet the sort worked as expected.
When I selected two adjacent columns (DatePd and $) the
sort wold not sort on DatePd (yes, the cells are formatted
for Date as 03/14/01). The $ sort worked ok. Right now
my work around is to select the two columns, copy to
clipboard, copy into Word as a Table and sort. Thanks for
your help.
 
I suspect that is your problem. Date is actually being stored as text
rather than dates, so you don't get the results you expect. You need to
convert these cells to Date values rather than text and then the sort should
work (it is actually working now, but giving you a text sort).

Select the Date column

Format the cells using a date format. (as a test, use one different from
how they appear now. If they don't change, then you definitely have text
rather than dates).

Now do Edit=>Replace
Find What: \
Replace with: \

Assumes your dates contain \

this should cause the cells to be reevaluated and stored as Dates
 
Another way to turn text dates into real dates would be to select the dates,
do data>text>to columns and click finish.
 
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