As far as sorting by the colour of the font is concerned, it could be done
via Word.

Suppose you want to sort in the order red, orange, yellow, green.

Copy the cells to Word.

In Word:

Go to Edit, Replace.
Enable Wildcards.
In the Find field, set the font format to red.
Replace (?) with 1£\1
In the Find field, set the format to orange and replace (?) with 2£\1
In the Find field, set the format to yellow and replace (?) with 3£\1
In the Find field, set the format to green and replace (?) with 4£\1

Do the sorting according to the replaced text.

Replace [0-9]£ with nothing.

Copy back to Excel.

As far as sorting by background colour is concerned, the answer seems to be
not without Visual Basic. This seems to be a shortcoming in Edit Replace in
Word. There was a query about this in the Word section.


"lephead" wrote:

Also, is it possible to sort by the color of font in a cell or the background
color; e.g. sort all items in yellow first then red, etc.