Alphabetisation in Excel: Its Definition and What are its Advantages?

If you want to know something powerful amongst Excel features, it is its ability to quickly and easily sort data. It includes both alphabetizing the lists of strings (i.e. putting them in an alphabetical order), and ordering the numerical values — both from the largest to smallest and smallest to the largest. In this blog, we will learn the procedure to do so, i.e. we will cover everything from standard alphabetization (sorting from A to Z) to the reverse alphabetization (sorting from Z to A) to sorting numbers.

Defining the problem

Have a look at the below spreadsheet, that shows orders from SnackWorld's customers between the months of January and March:
As it is visible, the list seems to be pretty messy on the first sight. If you wish to have a look at a particular customer's order history, it would be a very tough job to comb through the whole list and keep a note of each and every individual instance of that customer's name. But there’s a way out : If we apply alphabetization to the list, then it will become a lot much easier to read. And also a lot more user friendly for others who wish to use this sheet, in the coming future. Alphabetization has numerous advantages:
  • It becomes easier for a human to look up a particular value or customer name.
  • It helps user in manually scanning for duplicate entries, in case he / she has , made a data entry error.
  • It also help others who use the spreadsheet in understanding it faster and applying less effort and
  • It also allows us to easily group the orders for any particular customer together so that we can see them side-by-side.

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