Alphabetizing a very long list

Factual Questions
1

I have a word document with a list of words that I need to alphabetize. Word will sort a list of about 16,000 terms (it takes a minute or two but it will do it). Anything much more than that and it says “document too large.” Anyone know what I can do?

2

CTRL-A
Copy
Open Excel
Paste into Excel
Data, Sort
CTRL-A
Copy
Go back to Word
Edit, Paste Special, Unformatted Text

Excel should be able to handle sorting 64K lines without breathing hard.

3

Excel hits its limit around the 65K mark. If your list is longer that that, MS Access can easily handle it into the low millions of records. It would be trivial for me to do but it might take a tip or two to for you to do it. CookingWithGas recommendation is fine as long as you are below the 60K mark. There are a bunch of ways to solve the problem. I can do it for you if you need it. It only takes a few minutes.

4

If you’re only exceeding the capacity of Word by a little bit you could split and merge by hand.

For example, if you have a list of 30,000 words, cut it in half and sort the halves. Then take A-M from the first half and merge it with A-M from the second half and sort again. Repeat with N-Z from the first and second half. Now you can combine the two results back into a fully sorted list.

5

Ultra Edit.

I’ve yet to find a document that it couldn’t load and edit. According to the Features page for the product, it can load in a 4 GIGABYTE file. It’s a programmer’s text editor, but easy to use and there is a fully functional, time limited downloadable demo version. Export the text document out of Word, open it in Ultra Edit, select “File/Sort”, save it, Import back into Word. It can also do things that are downright arcane in Word, like capitalizing the first letter of each word, or selecting columns of text.

6

You could also go old school and use a Windows command line utility (batch command).

  1. Save your list of words to sort in a text file (.txt), one word per line, to, say, “C: emp\words.txt”.
  2. Open a command line window.
  3. type “sort c: emp\words.txt /t c: emp\sortwrds.txt”

When done, open up c: emp\sortwrds.txt.