MS Word 365 question

[hauckeye]

I'm trying to help my non-techy husband with his Word document, but I'm not a Word expert.

He has a section of text with lines of data, he has tabbed across the line to enter each data point:

Name Year Location Other
Name Year Location Other
etc

When he entered the data, he typed it in sorted by year, earliest year to latest year. Then after he saves the document and later opens the document again, Word has sorted that section alphabetically by name.

Does Word think this is a table? I can't figure out how to stop Word from re-sorting this text by name so it can stay sorted by Year.

[dslyahoo]

1. a suggestion

I haven’t tried to duplicate what you are seeing, but I have had to enter text across lines like you suggested. I found the simplest way was to create a table, enter the text, and then for table lines, select none. The text appears, but no lines. Easy to adjust and if any bit of text went longer than expected, the text wrapped around instead of pushing the tabs. Then sort the table on year or whatever else. Would be interested in a more elegant solution if one exists. Hope it works out.

[hauckeye]

2. Thanks, good suggestion

[lastlib]

3. If you convert it to a table, you can sort by any column from the Layout menu

If you already have it in text with tabs, just select all the data (with headings if you have them), click Insert>Table>convert text to table, then mark tabs as separator. Then you can do the sort the way you want.

Let us know if you need more help with it.