Super simple thing to do, but I can't see how. I have a row (not a column) and the first cell is a name. After that, a bunch of cells have numbers. I want to select all the cells with numbers and sort them in order from lowest to highest. Why is this not obvious, or am I just dim?
iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11), 3.4 GHz, Fusion drive
Thank you Barry. I do appreciate all the clear responses and I get that it is designed to be this way, but man, this is just nuts to me. Imagine you are working on a text document and you want to make one word in italics and you are told that if you do that, the entire document will be in italics, so you have to move the word to another document, make it italics and then copy it back. How dumb would that be? The notion that I can't select a column and sort it without the others also sorting is clear to me, but baffling. It just seems totally arcane to have to move data out of the document just to sort it.
Anyway, I get it and I really appreciate everyone taking the time to confirm what I never would have believed to be the case with a spreadsheet. Now I know!
Cheers
Numbers can only sort in a column.
one way to sort the Numbers would be to:
select the range with the numeric values, copy
create a new blank table where you can do some data manipulation
paste the data you copied,
now select the menu item "Table > Transpose Rows & Columns"
now sort using the column header
now select the menu item "Table > Transpose Rows & Columns"
now copy select and copy the numeric values
now past back to the original location
If you have many rows to do then I think this will need an Applescript
Thanks Barry. My analogy with italics was really a functional, user POV one. I do get what you mean, I just don't understand why.
I'm not sure what you mean by the column being in a separate part of the table or sheet. Where is that part? No matter where I copy and paste the column, I don't get any different behaviour.
Thank you Barry. Something is tripping me up and causing this not to work for me. When you say,
"Cells C2=C16 copied, then pasted onto (a different part of) the sheet, away from the original table."
No matter where I paste the numbers elsewhere on the sheet, it still causes other columns to re order. The key must be where I am pasting them, but I am pasting five columns east of the original table and it still does not work.
Possibly a vocabulary mismatch.
In Numbers:
Spreadsheet means the whole document.
A Spreadsheet may contain one or more Sheets
A Sheet is a 'blank canvas' extending as far as necessary down and right from the top left corner of the workspace. In Numbers 3, Sheets are often referred to as Tabs, due the series of Tabs across the top of a Numbers 3 workspace showing the names of the sheets in the document.
Each Sheet may contain one or more Tables, (plus other objects including images or other graphics, text boxes and charts (graphs)). These objects are placed 'on' the sheet.
A Sheet is NOT a large grid of cells. It is, as noted above, a blank canvas on which objects (including Tables) can be placed.
A Table is a block of cells arranged in rows and columns. Each Table is independent of the others on the same sheet. Adding or removing rows or columns from one table does not change any other Table on the Sheet. Changing the row height of one or more rows in one table has no effect on rows in the other tables on the same sheet.
Regards,
Barry
How do you sort a row of numbers?
