On  9 Jul 98 at 9:11, M Postmaster wrote:

> I have a large text file that was the  output of a database, it is
> a large membership list, and I need to open it up and sort it, I
> have tried to use Excel but when I open it and go about 5% of the
> way down the list I see nothing but a bunch of funny symbols, the
> text file is 6.1MB and has over 45,000 lines I am trying to open it
> up on a machine that has a P Pro200 w/64MB RAM so I figured the
> machine should be able to handle the file no problem so I think I
> am going about things the wrong way perhaps I shouldn't be using
> Excel? If not what should I be using? TIA

  The very best thing would be to have the original database output
this data in the sort order you want.  I'll assume, then, that this
question arises because that's not an option, that the original is
no longer available.

  While Excel has a nice user interface for sorting, it's pretty
low-powered as a database.  It adds a bunch of overhead, per column,
per row, and per cell, that a real database doesn't.

  There are two basic approaches to sorting a database.  The first,
which you've tried to do with Excel, is to try to shuffle all of the
records into order.  This tends to be very slow, and you have to do
it again if you want to sort on, say, zip code instead of name.
  The better approach is to identify "key" fields, and index them.
Each index contains just the defined keys, and a link to the record
that each goes with.  You can have several indices, with different
key fields, referring to the same set of records.  When the database
is output "using such-and-such index", the records will appear sorted
according to those keys.

  So "the right thing to do" is to import your data into a database,
create one or more indices, and take it from there.
  If you don't have a database on your PC, you have a few choices:
Access, FileMaker Pro, dBase.  Any of these should be able to handle
the job.

David G