Hi gang, welcome back!
In this video, we're covering how to sort rows in Google Sheets.
Let's use this donor sheet as an
example.
Let's say we want to sort our donors in order from highest gift to lowest gift.
We can see all gifts in column E.
The first step is to select your entire
sheet.
You can use keyboard shortcuts, or just click in the top left most quadrant of the sheet.
In the menu bar, click 'Data', then 'Sort range'.
This opens the sort dialog box. Before we choose the column to sort,
we need to check this box that reads 'Data has header row'.
This will lock our topmost row in
place, which means it won't get sorted
along with the rest of the rows
underneath it.
Now(in the dropdown), instead of the column letters, we can see the header name for each column.
Let's sort by that donation amount column.
Notice the sort options are A-Z and Z-A.
This doesn't make a lot of sense, since the donation column has numbers and not letters.
But the sorting still applies. A-Z represents ascending order, or lowest to highest,
and Z-A represents descending order, or highest to lowest.
We'll select Z-A and click 'Sort'.
Now our sheet has been sorted, and we can see our donations in descending order.
Now, there's one other way to sort - and
that's by using a filter.
If I select the entire sheet again, click 'Data' and then 'Create filter',
this turns on filters each column in my spreadsheet. So if I open the donation amount filter,
I can see that there's a sort option. I'll sort
my gifts in low to high order this time.
Regardless of how you sort, one note of
caution with filters.
If you add additional columns to your sheet, you must reset your filters each time
to guarantee that new columns are assigned a filter and sorted properly. Otherwise,
if you sort without doing this, you could
make an annoying data mistake. Like this one.
Notice how my new 'Contacted' column
didn't change when I resorted the sheet by donation amount.
Don't learn this one the hard way, gang!
Be sure to turn off those filters and turn them back on again, to avoid any data catastrophes.
And there you have it! That's how you
sort in Google Sheets. Till next time
