By rleist@hubspot.com (Rachel Leist)

Knowing how to sort in Excel can feel like a superpower. But unfortunately, many go through the tedious route of sorting and organizing data manually.

However, like many operations on Excel, there’s a workaround to sorting and organizing data with a few clicks.

In this guide, we’ll show you the different ways to use Excel’s sorting feature that you may not know about — so you can start using Excel like a pro.

Let’s start with the basics.

Table of Contents

• How to Sort in Excel
• How to Alphabetize in Excel
• Sorting Multiple Columns
• Sorting in Custom Order
• Sorting a Row
• Sort Your Conditional Formatting

1. Highlight the rows and/or columns you want to be sorted.

To sort a range of cells in Excel, click and drag your cursor across your spreadsheet to highlight all the cells you want to sort — even those rows and columns whose values you’re not sorting.

For example, suppose you want to sort column A, but there’s data associated with column A in columns B and C.

In that case, it’s essential to highlight all three columns to ensure the values in Columns B and C move along with the cells you’re sorting in Column A.

In the screenshot below, we will sort this sheet by the last name of Harry Potter characters. But each person’s first name and house need to go with each last name that gets sorted, or each column will become mismatched when we finish sorting.

2. Navigate to ‘Data’ along the top and select ‘Sort.’

Once you’ve highlighted all the data you want to sort, select the “Data” tab along the top navigation bar (you can see this button on the top-right of the screenshot in the first step above).

This tab will expand a new set of options beneath it, where you can select the “Sort” button. The icon has an “A-Z” graphic, as you can see below, but you can sort it in more ways than just alphabetically.

3. If sorting by column, select the column you want to order your sheet by.

A setting window will appear once you hit the “Sort” button. This is where you can configure what you’d like sorted and how you’d like to sort it.

If you’re sorting by a specific column, click “Column” — the leftmost dropdown menu, shown below — and select the column whose values you want to be your sorting criteria. In our case, it’ll be “Last Name.”

4. If sorting by row, click ‘Options’ and select ‘Sort left to right.’

<img alt="how to sort data in excel example" src="https://blog.hubspot.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Google%20Drive%20Integration/how%20to%20sort%20in%20excel_32023-3.png?width=600&height=279&name=how%20to%20sort%20in%20excel_32023-3.png" style="margin-left: …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron