2 Quick-and-dirty text sorting in Microsoft Word
A reader wrote me this past week with a little problem, one that they were taking a few too many steps to solve:
We often have to decide whether to capture data in Excel or in a Word document using a "table" format. We usually like the look and editing function better in Word because we are mostly tracking text entries with some date columns, not large amounts of numerical data. Am I correct that if we use Word, the data in the cells can't be re-sorted within the document, say by date and then by last name? Assuming that's correct, we often need to use Excel. Is there a simple way to take the data from an Excel spreadsheet and plunk it into a Word document where it will look better?
Good news: it's really very easy to sort tabular data in Microsoft Word, so there's (usually) no need to use Excel as an intermediary step.