Quick question for anyone good with Excel
Friday, 15 August 2003 03:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
taimatsuPart 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.
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.
