I am working with a church database and I need to sort in one column by
scripture (John 3:16-17). I am able to do the alphabetical sort but it will
not do the chapter sort after that. It goes from chapter 1 to chapter 10
then to chapter 2. Does anyone have any suggestions?
--
Thanks,

You could split up the book, chapter and verse into multiple columns

or maybe you could reenter your chapter and verses to include leading 0's.

John 03:016-017

Include enough leading zeros for the worse case.



Sue McDonald wrote:

I am working with a church database and I need to sort in one column by
scripture (John 3:16-17). I am able to do the alphabetical sort but it will
not do the chapter sort after that. It goes from chapter 1 to chapter 10
then to chapter 2. Does anyone have any suggestions?
--
Thanks,

--

Dave Peterson

This column sorts in this manner because the data type of this column is a
text string. Without going into any detail, this means that Excel is
grouping the ones with the ones, without considering if they are in the ones
place or the tens place.

One way to deal with this would be to create a new column "Chapter" which
only includes the chapter, and set the data type to "Number"

If you don't want to do this, you could use FIND and REPLACE to modify your
scripture column so that it only gives the chapter in double digits.
Highlight the scripture column, click "Replace" in the Edit menu. In the
'Find What' box, type "1:" and in the 'Replace with' box, type: "01:" (don't
type the quotation marks). Repeat this process for every digit (1-9). This
will make your column alphabetically searchable, but it won't be as anymore.
If you are using the text from this column in Church publications, I suggest
duplicating the column, so you have one for searching, and one for printing.

Hope this helps

"Sue McDonald" wrote:

I am working with a church database and I need to sort in one column by
scripture (John 3:16-17). I am able to do the alphabetical sort but it will
not do the chapter sort after that. It goes from chapter 1 to chapter 10
then to chapter 2. Does anyone have any suggestions?
--
Thanks,