Well … back in the long lost days of PE3, there was a function whereby you could just “block” a listing of items, press the appropriate key(s), and everything would be automatically sorted in alphabetical order.
So, I am wondering: in the current era of Windows, and Windows WORD … where does one find this capability???
To put this another way, if I have a large listing of items in a WORD file, (or in a text file), what is the quickest way to get that into alphabetical order using the capabilities of current day technology … ??
In the latest versions of Word, which behave somewhat differently than earlier ones, you can sort things alphabetically by highlighting the text and then pressing the “sort” button. It’s on the “home” tab in the paragraph section; it has an A over the letter Z and an arrow to the right.
Lots of plain text editors offer sort functions. In Notetab, for example, use Modify --> Lines --> Sort --> Ascending.
In older versions of Word, you can highlight text and click Sort from the Tables menu. It will sort by paragraph. You can sort by headings in you go to Outline View.
If you’re going to do this often and want a really fast way, you can easily program a function key or other key combination to do it; in all but the newest Word vesion, go to Tools --> Customize, then select the keyboard button at the bottom of the window. Then in the upper left menu “Categories” select Table, and in the right select Table Sort. Then in the area that says Press new shortcut key, type a key, such as F11, then Assign, Close, Close. Now test it; after selecting (blocking) the text, just hit F11 and Enter. Lightning fast.