I have an MS word table that needs to be alphabetized by last name. Unfortunately, the name column is simply “participant.” Because there are many foreign and multiple-names, I can’t simply use text-to-columns or other simple trick to break up the names, alphabetize, and re-combine.
I know there are two or three duplicate last names, but I don’t know whether there are any last names duplicated in full names. As in “Gabriel Garcia Marquez” and “Jerry Garcia.”
The key to all this is a different spreadsheet that does list the participants by last name.
I haven’t opened Access for seven or eight years (and have never used Access 2007), so my trivially small skills are coated with rust. I’ve imported both as tables, and am trying to create a query that … that … this is about as far as I’ve gotten.
I figure I should be able to create a table based on relating table2’s ‘last name’ field to table1’s ‘participant’ field, then order table1 by ‘last name’, but I can’t remember where to begin.
I’m in one of those situations where I feel like there’s an easy, automated way to do this but I just can’t wrap my head around it and will likely spend more time than if I just did it manually—something XKCD has hit on a couple times. Does a solution jump out at anyone?