Resorting Data- Help!!

Hello!! Hope you can help!

I am working on this large restaurant spreadsheet (with name, phone number,
hours, type of food, ect), and each time after I was done working on it I
would save it alphabetically. Now I have 1059 different restaurants. When I
would sort alphabetically I would highlight the whole spreadsheet and push
the A-Z button, not knowing that each column would sort indiviually. Now none
of my restaurants have the correct information (none of the rows match up).
So, I was wondering if there is a way I can go back and resort the
information back into the order that I entered it in? This would put most of
my information back into order.... most of the restaurants would them match
up. Is this possible? I hope you can help! Thanks for your time!

I'm sorry, and don't mean to be flippant, but you have had the "Sort of
disaster" visited upon you. When you highlight the whole sheet, Excel has
no way of knowing which column to use for the sort order (unless you've used
Data - Sort, where you specify the column(s) ). My guess is that you then
selected only one column, and then used one of the quick-sort (A-Z) buttons.
Unless you have empty columns between your columns, you should have seen a
message "There is data next to your selection ..." Later versions of
Excel are better at this, but Excel will still shamelessly ruin your table
if you've not selected all of it. There's likely nothing that Excel could
do to figure out which column goes with which column. I do hope you have
the original data somewhere, so you can sort this out. Umm... so to speak.

There's some info on sorting at
http://www.smokeylake.com/excel/excel_truths.htm

If only the restaurant name column was separately sorted, and the remaining
columns are intact, there's a way you can fix this without having to reenter
all the data. You would make a new table of only restaurant names, and
phone numbers. In adjacent columns in this new table, use a VLOOKUP against
the original (damaged) table, looking for the phone number, to get the
hours, food type and other columns. It would be based on phone number. You
can then convert them to permanent data with Copy and Paste special -
Values, and go from there.
--
Earl Kiosterud
www.smokeylake.com

"eide0084" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Hello!! Hope you can help!
>
> I am working on this large restaurant spreadsheet (with name, phone
> number,
> hours, type of food, ect), and each time after I was done working on it I
> would save it alphabetically. Now I have 1059 different restaurants. When
> I
> would sort alphabetically I would highlight the whole spreadsheet and push
> the A-Z button, not knowing that each column would sort indiviually. Now
> none
> of my restaurants have the correct information (none of the rows match
> up).
> So, I was wondering if there is a way I can go back and resort the
> information back into the order that I entered it in? This would put most
> of
> my information back into order.... most of the restaurants would them
> match
> up. Is this possible? I hope you can help! Thanks for your time!