(Tip: hit Ctrl+Z or click on the " Undo" button to cancel a sorting operation). When it comes to sorting unstructured text, like paragraphs or bulleted/numbered lists, you will need to manually select the range of data you want to sort, otherwise Word 2010 will attempt to sort the entire document, rarely what you'd want or expect. Word 2010 allows you to sort up to three criteria. In most cases, sorting by a single field will meet your needs if, however, you need to create nested sorts, just pick a value in the " Sort By" dropdown menu on the left (this is automatically done for you with tables), and this will "unlock" the next sort field. To only sort a few rows, select them manually and then click on the " Sort" button: Word will respect your selection and only work on it. Tip: as mentioned above, Word 2010 will automatically assume that you want to sort the entire table. We'll leave aside the more advanced " Options" button, used to configure sorting settings for unstructured data, like comma-separated or tab-separated sets.The default is ascending, but keep in mind that Word will remember, and automatically select, the last sort order you picked. Word 2010 then lets you choose between Ascending order ( a to z, 0 to 9), or Descending order (reversed sort).Finally, " Date" will allow Word to sort dates and times sensibly, i.e., based on their underlying temporal value, and not using alpha-numerical order!.With " number" sorting, Word will make symbols and letters appear before any number, with lowercase also appearing before uppercase characters and words. " Number" will make Microsoft Word sort intelligently numbers, making " 2" appear before " 10", for example.Note that in that scenario, the number " 2" will appear after the number " 10", because it starts with a " 2" (which is greater than " 1", the first character in " 10" - work around this side effect of text sorting by appending (" padding") your numbers with zeroes, as in " 01", or " 001", etc.) With " text" sorting, Microsoft Word will place lower case letters before their uppercase equivalent. If your data is mixed and includes symbols, numbers, and text, it will be sorted in that order. " Text" means that the data will be sorted alphabetically.Under the " Type" dropdown, you'll find three choices: depending on the " data type" of values in your column, Word 2010 will sort them differently: (next examples use ascending order).Because there was no header row, Word labeled our first column " Column 1".If you select " Header row" instead, the first row will be left out of the sorting operation. Let's look at the bottom of the dialog: Word 2010 has automatically recognized that our table includes " No header row" (which should not be sorted).Unlike regular text, a table is "structured" data, which includes additional options: Then, click on the " Sort" button in the " Home" tab of the ribbon:Īs soon as you do, Microsoft Word will automatically select the entire table (understanding that it is what you want to sort, without having to manually select a range of data), and the " Sort" dialog will open. First, create a table in your document, with two columns and at least three to five rows, and leave the cursor inside one of its cells (making it the current text object). Re-arranging rows in a table is the most common and most intuitive data sorting mechanism, since Word understands right away what you want to do (you'll note the contrast once we start talking about sorting other types of text elements, like lists or even entire paragraphs).