I apologize in advance, I don’t know all the correct terminology. I have MS Office 2003 and I’m not sure what program to use for this - all I have used is Word and Powerpoint. What I want to do is make a table with columns for things, and be able to click on the headings and make them sortable. Example: I am making a table of about 100 minerals and the names of the minerals will be in the left-most column. The headings across for each mineral will be: Chemical formula, classification, crystal system, occurrence, and a misc. heading. If I click on say, the crystal system heading, I want all the hexagonal minerals to be on the top of the list.
What program should I use, and how do I do it? I know it is a lot to ask, but I appreciate any help.
Use Access. When you want to create a new table, use the Table Wizard and it will walk you through the steps to create columns and populate your rows. Each column can be sorted in datasheet view when you are done.
Use Excel, and then highlight your column titles. Go to the toolbar and select:
Data > Filter > Autofilter
This should produce little clickable buttons in the cell of each column header. All different entries within each column show up in a drop down list for you to select and then excel automatically hides all other rows with different values in that column.
So if you have 3 columns:
a b c
a b f
a c w
b c c
a f f
and click on column 1, and select “a”, then row 4 would be hidden since “b” is the value in column 1. You can further subselect each colum down further so that if you now select value “b” from column 2, then rows 3 and 5 would also be hidden so you are left with rows 1 and 2 that match both “a” in column 1, and “b” in column 2.
You can also customise each sort by selecting data ranges, etc. Very quick, simple, and easy to use.
Depending on your ultimate use, either Access or Excel will work.
From your description, I’d have picked Excel, but used the Sort feature:
Highlight a cell; select Data > Sort
Excell will then give you a pop-up window to select the cells on which to sort the entire sheet, using up to three columns, each ascending or descending.
(You can highlight a column and click the little sort icons (AZ↓ and ZA↓ ) but they will sort the cells within that column separate from the rest of the data–not usually what one wants.)
I use the Filter option a lot, but it only hides rows, it does not change the order in which they are displayed.
Access may give you more overall flexibility, but it will take a bit longer to set up.
Thanks for all the help. I decided to do it in Excel. I tried Access, but got so confused on what type of file to create, I tried Excel.
I am using the list to study from. My professor sometimes asks questions like “Name four minerals typically found in low grade metamorphic rocks”, and if I can studly them by sorting them by different categories, I can usually come up with the answers on exams - I can do this by shuffling my flash cards, but there are so many on the final I wanted to try a different way to study. I like to find patterns and make mnemonics.
If you are looking to segregate and identify classes of items, CuriousCanuck’s Data>Filter>Autofilter method is probably superior to sorting.
You can filter on tighter and tighter groupings of objects (i.e., filter on one column at a time, selecting only the category you need for each colum) until only your final selection/category is left.