Sort order not being matched in pivot table
 

Hi

I have a large sheet of data compiled from other spreadsheets containing
data on people. 1 column is a category column based on the number of years
each person on the sheet took to get to a particular point in their career -
anything from 2 to 29 years so the categories go from 2-3 years to 21-29
years.

I initally had a sorting problem in the sheet - the categories "10-12",
"13-15" etc were coming before "2-3", "4-5", etc! I searched through here and
found a work around - formatting them using a custom time format as hours and
minutes, the spreadsheet now sorts perfectly - "2-3" comes before "10-12" etc.

However - I ran a a pivot table to show the number in each category (in
columns) and the sort order on the pivot table (ie the order of the columns)
is "10-12", "13-15" etc and 2-3 etc comes after! Naively I assumed the pivot
would sort in the same way as the spreadsheet, using the same formatting
logic.

Any idea how I get around this please? As an aside, I've tried doing a
crosstab of this data in Crystal Reports and oddly enough, the same thing
happens with the columns...

Thanks in advance for any help.

Sort order not being matched in pivot table
 

I'd change my data.

I'd include as many leading 0's as I needed to make all the entries have the
same format:

01-03
or
001-003



Deanery Phil wrote:

Hi

I have a large sheet of data compiled from other spreadsheets containing
data on people. 1 column is a category column based on the number of years
each person on the sheet took to get to a particular point in their career -
anything from 2 to 29 years so the categories go from 2-3 years to 21-29
years.

I initally had a sorting problem in the sheet - the categories "10-12",
"13-15" etc were coming before "2-3", "4-5", etc! I searched through here and
found a work around - formatting them using a custom time format as hours and
minutes, the spreadsheet now sorts perfectly - "2-3" comes before "10-12" etc.

However - I ran a a pivot table to show the number in each category (in
columns) and the sort order on the pivot table (ie the order of the columns)
is "10-12", "13-15" etc and 2-3 etc comes after! Naively I assumed the pivot
would sort in the same way as the spreadsheet, using the same formatting
logic.

Any idea how I get around this please? As an aside, I've tried doing a
crosstab of this data in Crystal Reports and oddly enough, the same thing
happens with the columns...

Thanks in advance for any help.

--

Dave Peterson

Sort order not being matched in pivot table
 

Thanks - not ideal for the table I want to present but I can see how it would
be useful for some other instances. Does seem a bit daft that something as
powerful as Excel gets so easily confused though...

I chucked it all into Crystal and customised the column headers from there
in the end - a bit OTT normally but I've been asked to put all the reports
into Crystal so the reports can update in real time as the data updates.

Thanks!

Phil

"Dave Peterson" wrote:

I'd change my data.

I'd include as many leading 0's as I needed to make all the entries have the
same format:

01-03
or
001-003