Page 224 - Excel Workbook for Dummies

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Chapter 16: Building and Maintaining Data Lists 207
The wildcard character, the asterisk (*), you entered after the C stands for all
other the missing letters in her name.
3. Select the Find Next button in the data form.
The first record that Excel finds where the last name begins with the letter C and
the office location is Boston is that of William Cobb.
4. Click the Find Next button a second time.

This time, Excel locates Sherry Caufield’s record, the 25th record of the 32 total.
5. Change Sherry’s profit sharing status from no to yes by replacing No with Yes in
the Profit Sharing field in the data form. Click the Criteria button.
Next, find Charles Smith’s record in the Employee Data List, an employee in the
Administration department.
6. Select the Clear button to clear the previous search criteria and then enter
Smith in the Last Name field and Administration in the Dept field. Click the
Find Next button.
Excel finds the record for Steven Smith in Administration.
7. Select the Find Next button a second time.
This time, Excel locates Charles Smith’s record, the 29th record of the 32 total.
8. Change Charles Smith’s location from San Francisco to Chicago. Click the Close
button to make the change and, at the same time, close the data form.
9. Save your changes to the Employee Data List worksheet in a new workbook named
Solved16-2.xls in your Chapter 16 folder in the My Practice Spreadsheets folder on
your hard disk and then leave the workbook file open for the next exercise.

Sorting Lists

Excel’s Sorting feature makes it easy to rearrange the records or even the fields in
your data list. You sort the records in your data list by sorting by rows, whereas you
sort the fields in the data list by sorting by columns.

In sorting, you can specify either ascending or descending sort order for your data.
When you specify ascending order (which is the default), Excel arranges text in A-to-Z
order and values from smallest to largest. When you specify descending order, Excel
reverses this order and arranges text in Z-to-A order and values range from largest to
smallest. When sorting on a date field, keep in mind that ascending order puts the
records in least-recent-to-most-recent date order, whereas descending order gives you
the records in most-recent-to-least-recent date order.

When you choose the ascending sort order for a field that contains many different
kinds of entries, Excel places numbers (from smallest to largest) before text (in alpha-
betical order) followed by Logical values (TRUE and FALSE), Error values, and, finally,
blank cells. When using the descending sort order, the program uses the same general
arrangement for the different types of entries but numbers go from largest to smallest,
text runs from Z to A, and the FALSE logical value precedes the TRUE logical value.

Using sorting keys

To sort your data, Excel uses sorting keys to determine how the records or fields
should be reordered in the data list. When sorting records, you indicate by cell
address which field (that is, column) contains the first or primary sorting key. When
sorting fields, you indicate which record (row) contains the primary sorting key.