I can't make my spreadsheet work

[ritaxis]

When I try to sort my spreadsheet (which is Quattro Pro, but it works as far as I can tell exactly like Excel), it will only sort a column at a time, which means of course that every gets screwed up. because I'm trying to treat the columns as fields, and the rows as single entries. How do I lock the rows straight across so that, for example, if I sort the items in column A alphabetically, the material in the other columns stays aligned with the proper entry in column A? I would have thought this behavior would be the default.

My submission tracker thingy doesn't work properly if I can't group all the entries for one title together -- as it gets longer it becomes harder to know whether I've seen all the places a story's been.

Of course this would be much simpler if the damned stories sold.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

You need to highlight the block you want to sort. That makes the whole row of data stay together when sorted. At least that's how it works in Excel and Word tables, so I assume it's the same for your spreadsheet.

If the block is large (more than a screenful) and you find it hard to highlight by clicking and dragging with the mouse, click in the top left cell of the block, scroll right until you can see the bottom right and then hold down the Shift key and click in the bottom right cell of the block. This will highlight the whole thing.

The spreadsheet's sorting behaviour makes it possible to choose whether to keep data together or just sort one column independently. In a database, you don't have a choice; all the data in a record is automatically kept together. But that's why my submission tracker is in a database.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I got it to work. But -- so I went looking for databases, and all I found were ones meant to be on the back end of websites.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

If it were Excel, I'd be certain that I have the answer for you -- not quite as certain whether it applies to Quattro.

If this were happening in Excel, it would be because you had selected a subset of columns and then told it to sort -- and it would obediently sort only the selected block and leave the rest alone. To keep the rows intact when sorting, you want to select your affected block as entire rows. In Excel, this would involve dragging your cursor along the "row marker" column at the far left of the table so that the highlighted portion stretches infinitely in the horizontal direction. If you're sorting the entire table, you can just click on the upper lefthand corner.

Does that sound like it works for your program?

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I don't know why it didn't work before, but now it does, thanks.