I'm sorry if I misunderstood this Paul, but from what your wrote it seems
not all columns / rows are sorting, causing First Street's completion date
to now be on the row for Second Street.  The most common cause for this is a
problem with the header row, and the most common problem is an empty cell in
the header row.  What occurs is Excel doesn't automatically select adjacent
columns or rows if there might be blanks.

The immediate fix is to make sure the header row has a label for every
column.  Then, SELECT the region to sort.  Clicking into a table and
choosing Data, Sort, does not allow you to adjust the sort region, so
pre-select the area to sort.  This gives Excel a chance to complain about
problems it is about to have with your table.  Some of the messages are
"adjacent columns look like they should be included".  See if this helps.

If I haven't described your problem exactly, let me know and I will try to
answer.

Tom Turak

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul A. Shippert [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 6:53 PM

Greetings list--

An employee of the agency for which I provide network and user support
has apprised me of a problem with sorting work order data in a multi-sheet
Excel workbook.  The computer is a P4 1.6 GHz, 128 RAM, 10GB Hard
Disk desktop by Gateway, and it is networked with 9 other client computers
in a Win NT 4.0 server environment.

The symptoms of the problem are as follows:
All sheets of the workbook have the same row 1 column names and, on a sort,
the first row is indicated as a header row.
As it is a work order tracking tool, start date and end date are two of the
columns.
As might be expected, not all cells are filled in with completion dates.
The employees using the spreadsheet were "savvy" enough to put house
numbers after street names to facilitate sorting data to find a given
order.
When the entire worksheet is selected, and a data sort is initiated by
street
name (with the first row indicated as a header row) the sheet *seems* to
sort.
What happens, though, is that data in cells (I'm speculating here, as I
didn't
create it) with 'general' number formatting is sorted, but the cells
formatted
as 'date' do not sort, i.e., a completion date will be associated with what
was
formerly a job with a blank cell in that column.

Is there something this individual is missing in sorting or formatting
which
makes this sort fail to rearrange complete rows based on the chosen
sorting column?

If anyone has an idea how to fix this, please let me know.
I'd sure like to look like an Excel lizard, er.... wizard, as well as the
"computer and network mechanic."

Paul A. Shippert

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