Writer: Sorting in a Table

users
#1

Microsoft Word allows sorting in a table by date, but apparently LO Writer does not. Am I correct? Is there a way to do it?
Ted

#2

Install the extension *sortwritertable* which can sort tables.
*Tools -> Extension Manager...*

#3

Microsoft Word allows sorting in a table by date, ...

Microsoft Word is apparently readily available. If you prefer it, why not use it?

... but apparently LO Writer does not.

This is not apparent to me.

Am I correct?

I think not.

Is there a way to do it?

Yup - but there are so many unknowns you will have to suck it and see.

o Do you have Tools | Options... | LibreOffice Writer | Table | Input in tables | Number recognition ticked? This will affect whether data entered is interpreted as genuine dates and not just as text. Try this option if others fail for you.

o Have you given relevant table cells Date number formats?

o Do you have dates expressed in logical formats, such as day - month - year or year - month - day, or the (illogical) USian standard month - day - year? This may affect your ability to sort dates expressed as text, but probably not if they have been properly formatted.

o What separators are you using: spaces, hyphens, dots, virgules (slashes), ...?

o Is your locale set appropriately for the date format you are using?

o Go to Table | Sort... . Experiment with Alphanumeric or Numeric according to what data your table cells contain. Something should work.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker

#4

Thank you. I installed the extension, and it works, but it lacks the ability to sort dates in the format Month/Day/Year. Asking it to sort 05/24/2008 and 10/24/2008 ascending would yield 10/24/2008 then 05/24/2008 because it just sorts numerically. I realize that our typical date format Month/Day/Year is not very logical, but I'm wondering if there's an extension for Writer that would accommodate it. Thanks again.

#5

Thank you. I'll try what you suggest, but I will become more wary about posing questions that would be considered dumb.

#6

Your suggestions have solved my problem.

#7

I'm not sure what you mean here: for what it's worth, nothing I said suggested that your question was "dumb". But the precise answer depended on a number of aspects you had not specified.

Brian Barker

#8

Good-oh! I was preparing to say more, but no need now.

Brian Barker

#9

Did a test with the extention.
Pasted 7 columns of a spreadsheet I have with a date column as the 7th
column with paste special as html format.

The sort extention then does sort the date field by the month, but if you
highlight the date column, and set the numeric format to yy-mm-dd or
yyyy-mm-dd, then the sort operation works correctly. After the sort, one can
then reset the format to whatever one wants.

Not sure if it works with other setups, but that does seem to work fine.

<users@global.libreoffice.org>
Date sent: Sat, 7 Jul 2018 19:42:05 +0000

#10

Thank you. I had not realized that I could set the numeric format to date in the form MM/DD/YYYY. When I do that and then sort using the regular numeric sort function (not the extension), it seems to work fine. Thanks to you and everyone for the help.