Excel sort is a very simple use of Microsoft EXCEL. sorting is a fundamental function of EXCEL, this article introduce several ways of excel sort method for you. When you face a lot of data in you excel sheets, if the data isn’t well sorted, you can’t effective edit it. In all recent versions of Excel, each sheet in your workbook can contain up to 65,536 rows of information. so excel sort is import for your excel use. Excel provides you some quick ways to make it easier to find and sort your data.

1. Excel Sort by One Column
2. Excel Sort by Two or Three Columns
3. Excel Using the Sort Buttons
4. Excel Sort by Four or More Columns

Imagine such a excel workbook with four Columns to sort.

excel-sort

Notice that cells A2 to E49 are selected, skipping the first row. When you have placed headings into your columns, Excel does not include them in the sort because if it did your headings would end up being sorted as data and placed elsewhere in the table.

Sort by One Column

Now, to open the Sort window, from the menu bar, choose Data | Sort. You’ll get a window similar to the one next.

excel-sort

I’ll go over each part of the Sort window:

• “Sort by”: By which column would you like to sort your data? Excel lets you support by up to three different fields, in the order you specify. For example, in your budget spreadsheet, you might sort by Department, and then, for each department, by Category, and then by Date. This would show you, for each department, a list of expenditures for each category, sorted by date.
• Ascending, Descending: Do you want to sort from big to small, or from small to big? From A to Z, or from Z to A? Choose Ascending to sort from A to Z (or from 0 to 9, or from January to December). Choose Descending to sort from Z to A (or from 9 to 0, or from December to January).
• My data range has: Your choices here are “Header row” and “No header row”. I indicated earlier that you should attempt to use a header row whenever you can. However, sometimes Excel gets confused about your data and can’t tell that you have a header row. If this happens when you open the Sort window, the “No header row” option is selected. If this happens to you, just select the “Header row” option to get Excel back on track.
• Options: Personally, I’ve never had a need to make use of the advanced sorting options offered through the Options button. For any normal sorting operation, you will not need to modify sort options. If you like, explore this area, though. One of the options there changes the sorting from columns to rows, so you could sort left-to-right instead of top-to-bottom, if you wanted.

Sort by Two or Three Columns

• Select all the cells in the list.
• Choose Data>Sort
• From the Sort by dropdown, select the first column you want to sort.
• Select to sort in Ascending or Descending order
• From the Then by dropdown, select the second column you want to sort.
• Select to sort in Ascending or Descending order

excel-sort

The result of this sorting operation is shown below.

excel-sort

The fast way to use excel sort

Using the sort window is all well and good, but what if you just want to sort by a single column? Perhaps you have data in no particular order, and you just want to sort it by date and be done with it. Excel provides with you a quick way to handle these super simple sorts. Take a look at Excel’s shortcut toolbar. A little more than two thirds of the way across the toolbar, notice two buttons: one is labels AZ with a down arrow and another ZA with an up arrow.