Sorting Data w/in Multiple sections

[jeff.nglc]

First of all, thanks for all the help in the past!

This time around I am responsible to track inventory, and I am doing so in an Excel 2007 spreadsheet that the company was using before I came on (I am most familiar w/2003). I have a huge inventory list (abt 2000 entries right now and growing) and it is broken into sections by equipment type (monitors, towers, phones, servers, switches, tools, etc). Each entry within any given section is first identified by an asset tag#, then is described by its make, model#, serial#, put in use date, person who is using it, etc, across that particular entry's row. I have simply been adding a row to the bottom of a particular section if I need to add new inventory to the list.

Each section had a merged and centered heading across the width of the sheet, but I had to unmerge that in order to sort the entire list by the name of the user or the asset tag#, both of which I have needed to do. When I left the section headings merged, I consistently got the error msg that reads something along the lines of "...merged cells need to be identically sized...", no matter how much I checked and re-checked that merged cells were, in fact, identically sized.

So I guess I have two questions:

1) Is there a way to sort the entire list without having to unmerge the section headings? If not, this isn't a huge deal, but it would be nice.

2) Is there also a way to sort by a particular column (in this case, user and/or asset tag#) within each section of equipment types, other that manually highlighting each section and sorting? This takes a while, and it is something that I need to do often, as our inventory often changes. This one would help a ton if anyone knows this answer.

Sorry if this is a little convoluted. I can't attach a screen shot (the information is not exactly mine to share...), so if you want/need a better idea of what I need I'll gladly throw together a sample spreadsheet. Just let me know. Many thanks in advance.

[jeff.nglc]

I put this worksheet together for another question I posted so I modified it to make this question a little more clear.

I want to be able to sort by the ID Code (or asset tag #) in Column 3 or by the User name in Column E, but I want to do keep each row within the proper section as I do so (there are 22 different sections in the real worksheet - this example only has 3).

Thanks again for the help.