Introduction to Excel

Maybe the most common task people associate with Excel is data sorting. Rightfully so, as this function is fast, readily available and powerful. With this said, I thought it to be a logical starting point.

In my walkthrough example, I will be taking a simple grocery list with two columns: item and isle. We will be sorting this list by isle (so you could go straight through the store) and then alphabetically by items on the same isle. Here we go, just follow the pictures:

Screenshot	Task Description
	Our initial list of data
	Select all columns by hovering the mouse over the column letter until the cursor turns into a down arrow. Click the left mouse button and drag it over the second column until both are highlighted. If you do not select all columns, only the selected columns will be sorted and the others will be left alone. While there are times you might want to do this, this is not one. We want to keep the item and isle data together.
	Select the menu option Data > Sort
	From the Sort options dialog box, select the first column to sort by. In this case we will sort by isle first, but you could just as easily sort alphabetically by item first.
	Select the secondary column to sort by, in this case the item column.
	Make sure you have the radio button for Header Row selected. This tells Excel the first row in the column is a description of what data the column contains. Since we have “Item” and “Isle”, respectively, on our first row we need to ignore this information.
	Tada! Our sheet is now sorted by isle and then alphabetically by item.