Sorting Microsoft's Word 2007 Numbered or Bulleted Lists



Posted: Monday, September 03, 2007

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It’s late (7:41pm), but since I haven’t blogged in a while I thought I quickly interject one about how to sort a numbered or bulleted list ascending (A to Z), descending (Z to A) or condescending (shaking fist at Word & yelling) in Microsoft’s Word 2007…

The simplest way of doing it is to select all your bullets or numbered list items in Word: Home tab>Paragraph group & /Sort button, /ok, and by default it’ll sort the first letter in your lists ascendingly. 

Now to get more advanced for those of you who are addicted to sorting and want more: did you know you can sort fields within the bullets?  What defines a field in a bullet or numbered list?  By default “Fields" are set to be Tab spaces (but you can change that to define it by punctuation marks too).  For example, lets say you have a 3 bulleted list, and in each bullet you started typing some text, pressed the Tab key and finished your text.  Then you have 2 fields separated by one Tab - meaning you have a field to the left and one to the right of the Tab, and hence 2 fields in your bulleted list to sort by…

So you’ll select your list of 3 bullets: Home tab>Paragraph group & /Sort button, then /first Sort by arrow>Field 1 and choose Descend, then /Then by arrow>Field 2 & choose Ascend, /ok, and so now you’ll see the bulleted list with all text on the left side of your Tab sorted descendingly (Z to A).  Note: NOTHING will be sorted in the 2nd field UNLESS you have exact same words or text on 2 or more bullets in Field 1, and if you do Microsoft Word will then go to Field 2 and sort that, in this example, descendingly.

Whew!  I enjoy showing you on Microsoft’s Word 2007 training video, but let me know if above makes sense or not, and if I have to yet I’ll re-write.

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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)
» left by Becky Balsley from Cincinnati, Ohio 3 years 126 days ago.
I want to sort columns of titles and keep the number that they're attached to
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