Dotan Cohen wrote:
I am reviewing the records of a local shop to help him convert to Open Office. I have found no problems with the simple Word documents that he uses, but he is using MS Excel where he should have a real database. We all know about efforts to teach an old dog new tricks, so let's just be glad that he is interested in this new trick called Open Office. He will _not_ be moving to Base or anything else, it will be either in Excel or another spreadsheet.In this particular case, he has information that should be in a single row (record) divided into to rows, with the A column's cells merged between the two and the "sorting key" stored in that cell. He now wants to sort based on the merged cells, keeping the dual-row records intact. Example: --------------------------- 1 | Some info | More info --------------------------- 3 | Yet some more info | And more info --------------------------- 2 | Some important info | More important info --------------------------- He now needs to sort that! Does anybody know how this can be done? Trying the regular sort function returns an error that range containing merged cells can only be sorted without formats. Example document here: http://dotancohen.com/images/examples/sort-example.ods Thanks.
How was this done in Excel? I tried creating a similar sheet in Excel 2003 (at work) and that wouldn't sort with the merged cells either.
I think the easiest solution would be move the data from the second line of each record into extra columns on the first line, so each record is only a single line of the table. Then you'd be able to sort or filter on any other column (e.g. age or position) if needed. Depending on the number of records, it may be easy enough to do manually, or you prefer to write a macro, or export to CSV and process through some other software.
Hope that helps. Mark. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] For additional commands send email to [email protected] with Subject: help
