Sorting alphanumerical characters sequencially.

Good morning,

I have a huge project at work that needs to be done on Excel. It involves a bunch of samples, each assign an alphanumerical character from 1 to 12 using also the letters A through H. To make this more understandable, I need to sort out an entire column in the following format. (A1,B1,C1,D1,A2,B2,C2,D2,A3,B3,D3,D4....) that goes all the way to A12 to H12, Howeverm wehn i try to sort out, it gives the alphabetical option and then all my data is a mess. is there any formula to do this more easily, that does not involve retyping the information or splitting letters from numbers into two different columns? please help me. I realize it might be wicked easy to most of you techies, but im not very much computer-literate and this project is due this monday.


Thanks a lot guys!!!!!

Ron,

That was very helpful and I will sure give it a try. However, I was looking for a more simple approach to this. I have attached an image of my current column and as you can see I have all the values but I now need to sort them in an ABCDEFGH format but also a 1 to 12 sequence so instead of A1,A2,A3,A4...I would need A1,B1,C1,D1 within the same column. I guess its not much of a formula but a type of sorting out. If I were to make my custom sorting, what would you think would be a way to best accomplish this? I feel like this is so easy yet i cant do it.

forgot to post the image . here it goesa.JPG

Hi there!

You can accomplish your task with a little VBA Sub.

Open your workbook and hit alt. F11. This will open the VBA editor. Goto the Insert tab and select Module. A window will open. Paste the code below into the window and only two small tasks remain. 1. identifying the column number that contains the data you want to sort, and 2. assigning the macro to a shortcut key, like ctrl+S or something.

I assume you have headings on your columns. If not we will have to adjust the code for that as well. This code as is, will sort all data from the 2nd row down and I have the sort data column as 3. There is a note around this row explaining which number to change.

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To assign the Macro to a shortcut key, go to the view tab in the ribbon at the top of the spreadsheet. On the right, you will see Macros. Click and select View Macros. If you have multiple macros, find the one called Sort, and highlight it. Click the Options Button. Where it says Shortcut Key, pick the letter you want to use and click OK. Close the Macro window and now, when you hit ctrl+(your letter), the Macro will run, sorting your entire sheet based on the column containing the sort data.

And I just looked at your image above, so here is code corrected for your spreadsheet.

Please Note... Anything to the right of Column F will move up or down with the stuff inside the border. You can add NOTHING to column A or it will throw the Macro off to the right. You can add NOTHING to rows 1-4 or it will throw the Macro off to the south. It's best if this page stays exactly as is and data only is added to the columns within the borders. In order to make the Macro more stable in that regard, you need to use named ranges... and that - that is a-whole-nother tutorial

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