Sorting sheet by background color?

Question

Level 1

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Sorting sheet by background color?

Hi board,

I am wondering if it is possible to sort a spreadsheet by row color? In other words I have a 3-column (Company, City, State) sheet with 500 rows of information. In Excel I can change the background color of any row or rows and then sort the sheet according to color.

Make sense?

Is this possible in Numbers '09?

Thanks in advance.

Power mac G5, Mac OS X (10.4.8), 2.0 Dual

Posted on Oct 19, 2009 12:32 PM

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Answer 1

Badunit

Level 7

30,714 points

Oct 19, 2009 12:54 PM in response to prim8

That is interesting. How do you do that in Excel? I've never seen that sorting option, just ascending and descending based on the values in the cells.

I know of no way to do it by color in Numbers. Sorting is based on the values in the cells.

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Answer 2

Oct 19, 2009 1:57 PM in response to prim8

The only thing I can imagine of is to add a fourth column and insert a number or letter for the colors. Like R G B or so. In conditional formating apply the colors accordingly. Then use the groupin tool to bring them in the right order.

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Answer 3

prim8 Author

Level 1

0 points

Oct 19, 2009 3:37 PM in response to Badunit

Yeah in Office 2007 for Win there is a function in the filter menu (maybe the custom section) that allows you to sort by cell and/or text color, pretty cool. I dont think the function has been added into Office 2008 Mac at least I cant find it.

In Win Office 2003 and before you had to add a marker column and sort with that , it looks like I may have to do that again in Numbers - pity.

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Answer 4

KOENIG Yvan

Level 8

41,819 points

Oct 20, 2009 12:49 PM in response to prim8

I already posted a script grabbing the color of the background color (we must define the cell itslf as the analysed range) so we may store the color descriptor in an auxikiary column and sort uoun thus color.

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