Expand Selection (Calc: Data Sort)

[Steve Hart]

I'm a convert from MS Office 2003...Need to sort a spreadsheet by a single column.

When doing this in Excel I select the column I want to sort by, then click the A>Z or Z>A sort button on the tool bar. Upon this action Excel always senses what I'm trying to do and asks if I want to expand the selection -- I click 'Yes' and the data is sorted with the rows staying intact (except now they are in the desired order).

Clicking the A>Z sort button in Calc -- just sorts that column... making the data useless because this was the only column of the data being sorted -- I never get prompted by Calc to expand the selection. Is there something I can enable in preferences that would do this when I do quick sorting?

Thanks,

[pingju]

When I tried this in Excel 2003 and Calc, seems to me they have the same manner of sorting a column. Excel did not ask me to extend my selection.

Maybe there is an options can be preset in Excel?

[acknak]

Clicking the A>Z sort button in Calc -- just sorts that column...

This is in the process of being changed to work exactly like Excel in this situation. The changes are already in the developer snapshots and will be released with OOo 3.2 in late November.

In the meantime, with OOo 3.1.1, you can easily sort rows by a particular column if you just avoid selecting the entire column. Instead, simply click on any cell in the column you want to sort by, then click the sorting button. Calc will automatically extend the selection and sort by the column of the current cell.

Using the Data > Sort menu, the selection will also be extended automatically, but you have a full access to all the sorting options, including what column(s) you want to sort on.