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Can someone please direct me to a detailed explanation (link) of the Gnumeric sort function? The Gnumeric manual is abbreviated and has no examples. I haven't been able to find any appropriate info through the search engines and even Stackoverflow only has half a dozen questions on it which don't suit.

My problem is:
I have a table with rows of dates, names, and columns of data. (pretty straightforward stuff).
I want to sort ALL columns by the NAME column. That is: keep each row intact for data but move them in the table up or down so that the order is alphabetic by name. I can do this easily with Libercalc but prefer the feel and simplicity of Gnumeric, yet I have never been able to understand from the drop-down sort menu how to get this done. I can sort any column fine by itself, but can't seem to lock the other data in the row to be taken with it. This is such a frequent function I'm surprised it's not made clearer in the drop-down menu. That is: Order by column x

The only way one can sort with Gnumeric, apparently, is to move the key column (i.e. in my case the NAME column) to be the left-most column (column A) in the table, and then sort, subsequently moving the columns back into their required format (date and time in first column) as I want it. This seems very clumsy to me and I wondered if there was an easier way of ordering a table in any format (e.g. just as it is imported from the csv file) by simply selecting the column to sort wherever it is in the table, as can be done in LiberCalc?

Ravenix
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Johnny
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  • Well how would anyone guess that from the options on the drop-down? I expected the 'Clear' button to be used to clear all the 'case sensitive' options, not clear all the columns and allow you to select which one to 'ADD' as the key for sorting. It would be better if the button said 'Select column to sort' or some such. Anyway thank you very much for helping me and presumably my query and your answer will, via the search engines, help others in my position. Respect. – Johnny Feb 27 '18 at 15:24

1 Answers1

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1) You need to select ALL the columns you want to sort:

      menu > data > sort

2) Keep the column with the NAMEs to be sorted, and remove the rest of the columns in:

    sort specification
J_P
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