Sorting data and referring to the labels

[saini]

hello,

I have a worksheet that contains 2047 columns and 64 rows of data plus top row and left column contains labels, most important labels are the left column.

I want to sort each column individually by largest to smallest values, the problem with this is that it looses the information which row label it belongs to.

e.g. each row is labeled with feature1, feature 2, and then feature 3 and so on .... up to feature 64

-------------------col1---col2---col3
row1(feature1)-- 2 8 3
row2(feature2)-- 1 2 2
row3(feature3)-- 5 6 1

if I sort the data (not including the column label) by largest to smallest, the sheet turns into this, col1 and col2 are re-arranged but now it doesn't relate to the correct row label

-------------------col1---col2---col3
row1(feature1)-- 5 8 3
row2(feature2)-- 2 6 2
row3(feature3)-- 1 2 1

how is it possible to sort data and still be able to refer which feature number it belongs to bearing in mind there are over 2000 cols?

Kind Regards

[ChemistB]

I assume you have "feature 1", "feature 2", etc in column A? If so, why don't you include that in your sort?

[saini]

feature1, feature2 .... feature65 etc labels are all in colA, but, if I include colA in the sort it will only refer to the first column of data and cannot reflect the order of the other columns because once the features are ordered largest to smallest each row will have a different order.

In the example I provided (second table) after a sort, col1 highest feature is feature3, col2 highest feature is feature1. I would like to know how I will able to know which feature each cell belongs to because colA labels will be useless in this case.

[ChemistB]

Ahhh, I see now. If you have 2047 columns and you are going to be sorting them individually, I can't see any easy way to keep track of where they came from. You could put a dummy column next to each one of them and then sort each set. (See example). Other than that, I'm at a loss.