You can easily sort your list by a certain column by clicking on the column header for that column. Clicking once will sort the list in ascending order by that column. Clicking a second time will then sort in descending order by that column. If you edit an item in your list after sorting, clicking the column header will reapply that sort again rather than switching between ascending and descending orders.
Sorting Modes
Each list can be configured to operate in one of two modes when maintaining the order of your list items. These two modes are controlled by the Reorder After Sorting option in the Settings Tab of the List Properties window. These two modes operate as described below:
Reorder After Sorting is On
This is the default mode for new lists. When you sort your list, the items are rearranged into the new sorted order and the previous order is lost. In this mode, the Remove Sorting menu function is never available.
Reorder After Sorting is Off
In this mode, sorting your list actually causes a temporary sort order to be applied. The items will remain in their original order, but they will be displayed in sorted order. If you want to make the order permanent, you can select Reorder List from the Tools menu. Alternatively, you can remove the temporary sorting by selecting Remove Sorting from the View menu.
While a temporary sort is in effect, you can not reposition the items by dragging them or using the move buttons. In addition, new items added to the list are automatically displayed in their sorted position.
In versions of ListPro prior to 3.0, this mode was always used.
Choosing a Mode
If you want to see the temporary and permanent ordering more clearly, turn on the Show Item Numbers option in the Settings Tab of the List Properties Window. This option causes the Item column of each item to display its item number, which is just the numerical position of the item in the list. If the list is not sorted, the item numbers will be in order. If you sort the list using a temporary sort (Reorder After Sorting is off), the item numbers may no longer be in order. If you make the sort permanent by picking Reorder List, you’ll see that the items continue to be displayed in the same order, but the item numbers are now in order. If you sort the list using a permanent sort (Reorder After Sorting is turned on), the item numbers always remain in order even though the order of the items is changed by the sort.
In most cases you’ll probably want to leave Reorder After Sort on. You may want to turn it off, however, if the items in your list have an inherent order that you want to control. Examples of this type of list might be a recipe where the steps must be done in a certain order or a classic process checklist where the items are checked off in a specific order. Sorting may still be useful with such lists because you may want to use it to temporarily group items by category or view items from highest to lowest by some column.
Another consideration for very large lists is that Reorder After Sort may slow down sorting noticeably because the items must be moved as well as sorted. In this case you can speed up the sorting by turning Reorder After Sort off and manually reordering the list when necessary by picking the Reorder List menu function.
Sorting by Multiple Columns
Often you want to sort your list by one column, but within items having the same value of that column you’d like to sort by a different column. For example, if your list has Project names as its Category values, you may want to sort by Category in order to group the items by Project, but within each Project you’d like to sort the items by Priority.
To accomplish this, choose Sort By from the View menu. You’ll see the Sort dialog, which will allow you to choose three columns to sort by. For each column you can also choose whether to sort in ascending or descending order. For the example above, you’d choose Category for the first column, Priority for the second column and leave <None> for the third. You’d leave Ascending as the choice for all of them.