I always have interesting Microsoft Office questions come across my desk and today was one of those days. Someone sent a Word file that was a multiple page bibliography and wanted to know if there was an easy way to sort the list alphabetically. Because it is a bibliography it’s formatted with the first line flush and subsequent lines indented and a space between each entry. I never had a reason to look for this, but was excited to find a Sort option in the Tables menu. Here’s what I did:
- Highlight the entire list using the mouse.
- From the Table menu on the toolbar, click the Sort option; the Sort Text window will appear.
- Under the Sort By Field, make sure that Paragraphs is selected.
- Beside the type field, use the drop down arrow to select the type of data you want to sort. For example, if you want to sort a list by alphabetical order, select the text option.
- Finally, select the button beside either ascending or descending and click OK. Your list will now be sorted based on the sort options you selected.
Worked like a charm. It removed the spacing between entries, but you could fix that with Styles if you wanted.
