Easily Sort Data Using Excel Sort Function – Helpful Guide

Updated June 12, 2023

Part -18 – Excel Sort Function

Download Excel Templates – Excel Sort Function

Excel Sort Function (without solution)

Excel Sort Function (with solution)

Transcript For The Video – Excel Sort Function

In this set of video tutorial, we are going to talk about one of the amazing features that are Excel sort function. Now when you look at sort, as the word says, you want to sort this data in a particular order, so in doing so, it is further enabling us to get deeper insights about the data which we are using, say, for example, this data here which we have in terms of our case study.

This is the data that we have; if you look at this data very closely, you will find employees come from different departments, different genders, they have different salaries, and they are not in any particular order. So let’s say if we want to sort this data out, depending on specific criteria or conditions, say, for example, to start with.

I want to sort this data by name, all in alphabetical order, so since this table is not sorted, we need to kind of sort that out. In this way, we can use the Excel sort function. I will just demonstrate how that can be used. The first thing that we have to do is, we need to select the whole table on which we want to perform a sort depending on a condition. So the condition which I am using as of now is to sort the names by alphabetical order. So once I have selected this table like this, click on sort; so when we click on sort, you will find that there is a sort dialogue box that opens up. So when we click on this button, sort by, you will find that it tasks us for different kinds of options, sort by name, sort by department, gender, monthly salaries, annual salaries, taxes. So all the headings are essentially identified automatically by the sort function. So let me sort them by name, and what kind of sort it should be for us? It should be a sort by values because we have not had different kind of color combinations for different fonts. Let’s say if a specific cell was colored in red, you could have actually sorted by that as well, so, however, in our case, values is what we will kind of choose. The order should it be z to a or a to z, so  I will here choose a to z and click ok, so the moment I do that, you may notice that all your names get sorted automatically, and the other thing that also happens is the corresponding entries which are related to the respective sort also gets updated automatically. So if I quickly do an undo, in order to show you what has happened so, let me show you Aaron, which comes on the top.

Aaron is a marketing professional, and he is a male; his monthly salary is 8700 dollars, and his percentage total annual salary is 9.14. So let me perform a sort again in order to check that the corresponding entries also gets sorted as far as sort goes. So let’s click on the sort, and I click on name, value, A to Z, and we click ok. And now let’s check for Aaron; Aaron is a marketing professional and a male; his salary is the same as we just saw 8700 dollars, and his percentage annual salary was 9.14 as a total salary, so looks like this table gets updated automatically. So it can provide you a very systematic way of looking at your data or having a fresh perspective of the data.

Maybe you know alphabetical name is not making sense. You may like to kind of sort your data by maybe annual salaries. So let’s try and do that and see that if that is making sense. Click on sort, choose annual salaries, and in this annual salary, you will find that it is prompting us from smallest to largest or from largest to smallest. Let’s say I want the largest on the top and smallest at the bottom, so I do that, and I click ok. So as you can see, the annual salaries the professionals who have higher annual salaries are at the top, and lower are at the bottom so it provides you a schematic way of doing deeper analysis, and you can make a more efficient way of using Excel sort function.

Recommended courses

This article has been a guide to the Excel sort function and how to sort the data using the inbuilt function provided in MS office excel. This post is a complete heads-up on the Excel sort function. Following are the external link related to Excel, so go through the links for more details.