Quick question for anyone good with Excel

[taimatsu]

Part of my aptitude test for the job interview this morning involved working with Excel. I'm pretty good with spreadsheets, and I managed 90% of it no trouble. There was one bit I had to kludge, though. Imagine you have a brief table containing data on five courses, one course to a row. First column, course code (W30456L, for example). Second column, course title (Learning IT). Third column, tutor's name (Adams, Linda). Fourth column, day, and fifth column, time.

Say I want to sort the courses alphabetically by the course title. That's in the second column, and if I select the whole table and push the A>Z button, it sorts on the first col., the course code. If I just select column 2, and sort, it only does that column, it doesn;t take the rest with it. What should I do?

I didn't have time to go through the help files. I cheated slightly (they were interested in the result, not how I got there, and no-one checked what I was actually doing) and inserted an extra column at the start, pasted the course title column in at the front there, sorted it on that, and then deleted it before printing. Not ideal for complex data. There must be an easier way, but I don't know what it is.

Comments

[robinbloke.livejournal.com]

On Excel 2000

Highlight the block
DataMenu->Sort
Choose column to sort by in the 'Sort by' box

[nevecat.livejournal.com]

Select the table, and use the Data>Sort function (ie the Sort function from the Data tab) - you can do much more with that than the evil A->Z icon.

I'd give a step-by-step explanation, but I think it's actually fairly intuitive once you know where it is, so try having a play & then ask if it still doesn't make sense.

[chrisvenus]

I didn't even know there was an evil A-Z icon... That's just nasty...

[suave-steve.livejournal.com]

What Robin and Caroline said.

Spot people who use Excel all day :)

[noidd.livejournal.com]

What is important is that you could do it - not that you "learned" how to do it.

You got a problem, you didn't know the answer "parrot fashon" so you create your own solution by logically analysing what you need to do.

In my view this would place you higher up my hire list than someone who learned by rote.