On Saturday 13 September 2008 23:24, Brian Barker wrote:
> You can do something along this line:
> o  Type your characters (or strings) in your sort order into a column
> of a spreadsheet.
> o  Select the list.
> o  Go to Tools | Options... | OpenOffice.org Calc | Sort Lists and
> press Copy and OK.
> o  To sort material, go to Data | Sort ... .
> o  On the Options tab, tick "Custom sort order" and select your created
> order.
>
> This works quite well for individual characters or strings, but I'm
> not sure to what extent it works in the more general sense of sorting
> strings according to a character order.  It seems not to.

Thanks for responding, but unfortunately it doesn't work :(

Just for clarification, what I want to do is to sort various types of phonetic 
lists according to an order that I create. These rows would be sorted:
alwez   always
ed              aid
it              eat
bin             bean
bIn             bin
klem            claim
The lists can be quite long (up to 5000-10,000 entries), and I eventually need 
to accommodate IPA characters such as the funny n with the tail for the 'ng' 
sound, inverted e, etc.

I thought of a couple of possibilities, but I'm not sure if they're possible 
(or practical) to do in Calc. First would be a sort key column. If my words 
to sort were in Column A, I would need some kind of macro to generate a key 
in, say, Column C. I could use a -> a, e -> b, i->c, and so on. The second 
way would be to create my own sort algorithm with a macro.

I'm thinking that the first way is simpler. I don't know much about Calc 
macros, though. Is there an example somewhere that would do something like: 
take words from Column A, count the number of vowels (or whatever) and put 
the result in C. If I had an example like that, I could figure out the rest.

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