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John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh] John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh] is offline
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Default chronological order by dates in Word

The sort you are performing is an "alphabetic" sort.

You need to express the dates in such a way that the individual characters
will sort in sequence, remembering that in an alphabetic sort spaces,
commas, hyphens and slashes are all significant sortable characters.

So 1 January 1980 will sort as "1 space j" whereas January 1, 1970 will sort
as "jan". In those examples, the year is the least significant thing.

Robert is suggesting that you use an ISO-standard date: 19800124 is 24th
January, 1980 and it will sort perfectly in sequence providing all other
dates are expressed in the same format.

Alternatively, tip your table into Excel and define the date column as a
"Date". Excel then expresses each date as the number of days since January
1, 1900 and sorts them as integer numbers. There's less chance of error,
and you can choose to have the date *displayed* in any format you like,
while internally it remains a single integer.

Hope this helps

On 5/2/07 7:01 AM, in article
, "abbymae"
wrote:

I am working on a word document for college and am trying to put a list of
presdents in chronological order but when I try and do it with the tables,
sort option it wont do it...what am I doing wrong? can anyone help me? It
will let me put the names in order but not the dates


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John McGhie
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410