Sorting

[Guest]

I am entering items into a form for a report. I do not want the items
sorted. I need to have them listed as entered. How can I stop it from
sorting them in alpha order?

 

[Guest]

I am entering items into a form for a report. I do not want the items
sorted. I need to have them listed as entered. How can I stop it from
sorting them in alpha order? I do not have the tables or queries set up to
sort. They are just being sorted somehow in the report.

Ronnie

 

[Douglas J Steele]

You should never make any assumptions about the order in which records are
returned in a recordset. If the order is important, then you must have a
field (or fields) in the table that can be used in conjunction with an ORDER
BY statement to return the rows in the correct order.

For what you're trying to do, adding a CreateDTM field, of datatype
Date/Time, with a default value of Now(), should be sufficient. Note that
for reports, the ordering is controlled through the Sorting and Grouping
dialog, not through the order of the underlying table or query.

 

[John Vinson]

I am entering items into a form for a report. I do not want the items
sorted. I need to have them listed as entered. How can I stop it from
sorting them in alpha order?

Small correction:

You are not entering items into a Form.

You are *using* a form as a tool to enter items into a Table. Forms
don't contain data; tables do.

A Table HAS NO ORDER, in any usable sense. It's a "bag" of records. If
you want to see those records in a particular order, you must - no
option! - use a Query sorting the records by a field within the table.

If you don't specify a sort order, Access will (usually) display them
in Primary Key order. I'd suggest that you add some field that sorts
the records chronologically by date/time entered; this could be just a
date/time field with a default value of Now(). Base your Form (and
your report) on a Query sorting the table by this field and you should
be in good shape.

John W. Vinson[MVP]