Excel 2007 Sort-How to Retain Sort Order

[devistated]

In earlier versions of Excel, if you had a worksheet that you sorted, then
the sort columns and order (ascending/descending) was retained, so that if
you added data and wanted to sort it, you simply told Excel to re-do the same
sort.

But in Excel 2007, the sort instructions are not retained, so that I have to
recreate the entire sort instructions from scratch every time that I need to
sort the worksheet.

How do I get Excel to retain the sort instructions for a worksheet so that I
can re-sort the worksheet without having to laboriously re-create the sort
instructions every time that I need to sort the worksheet?

 

[ShaneDevenshire]

Hi,

Excel retains the sort in my version of Excel 2007. On my machine it seems
to remember all sorts.

 

[devistated]

Hmmm ... that's what the help said should happen ("Sort criteria are saved
with the workbook so that you can reapply the sort each time that you open
the workbook for an Excel table, but not for a range of cells. If you want to
save sort criteria so that you can periodically reapply a sort when you open
a workbook, then it's a good idea to use a table. This is especially
important for multicolumn sorts or for sorts that take a long time to
create."), but whenever I press click the SORT icon on the DATA tab on a
pre-2007 worksheet, it gives me a completely blank sort criteria box.

It does seem to retain the criteria for the sheet if I save it as an Excel
2007 spreadsheet, but I cannot find any way to get it to retain my Excel 2003
spreadsheet sort orders.

Since I need to share some of my spreadsheets with people who are not
sophisticated and do not have Excel-2007 reader tools and only have Excel
2003, I want to keep these spreadsheets in the 2003 format.

Even though Excel 2003 retained Excel 2003 spreadsheet sort criteria, Excel
2007 apparently does not retain Excel 2003 spreadhseet sort criteria. So I
guess I will just have to do the extra work for those spreadsheets that have
to stay in Excel 2003.

 

[tedmi]

XL'07 remembers sort criteria that were created and saved under previous
versions. So, open your spreadsheet with XL '03, set the sort criteria, save,
and open with '07 in compatibility mode. (Tested with '02, but should work
with '03).