Excel 2007 : Grouping data then sorting (very frustrating)

[DennisP2]

Hi Everyone,

I am hoping someone will have an answer to this. It seems like it should be simple, but I can't seem to figure it out.

At work we have a list that shows a name (A1), some dates (A2 through A4) and comments (A5). Sometimes the dates in A3 change. We want to capture the old dates in B3, C3, etc. with all the other cells in B, C, respectively being blank. We then want to sort on A2. Now with another "group" starting at D1 through D5, we need to keep rows A, B, and C together. We also want to hide B and C when not printing.

I've tried grouping/outling A, B, and C, but when I sort they either break up or don't sort at all, depending on what's visibile using the 123 buttons at top.

I hope that makes sense.

Thank you so much for any help you can give!

[martindwilson]

lots of wants there! post a sheet with what you have before and what you would like to see after .

[DennisP2]

Hi Martin, Thanks for the reply. I know that it seemed complicated, but it's not really.

Since I don't know how to insert a sheet, I did a mock in picture. All we want to do is hide rows 3 and 4, 6 and 7 until we want to print the whole thing. Unfortunately, all the ways I've tried (hiding, grouping/outling) breaks up all the rows when sorting.

Thanks so much for your help!!!

[martindwilson]

to keep them together when sorting you need to fill in those blanks in fields you want to sort by or just have another column/s with them filled in to sort by
example to get a filled list of documents in another column say col X
then use in x2 and dragged down
=IF(A2="",X1,A2) repeat for each column say "writer" in col. Y =IF(B2="",Y1,B2)