title: Sorting Data in Excel
body: <p>I have recently been working on a data table in Excel containing measurements of fossil specimens. In addition to containing things like the specimen number, species name, etc., the table also contains measurements from the fossils in question. However, because several specimens have data from both the left and right sides of the specimen, I often end up with situations where a single entry spans multiple rows, which means I cannot sort the data.</p>
  
  <p>I have looked elsewhere on the Internet for a solution, and the only response I have gotten is that Excel doesn't really work well with entries spanning multiple rows, and I should reorganize my data. I understand that, and I have been looking for an alternate way of organizing the data. However, I have not been able to find an easy way to organize the data. I have tried reorganizing the information so each entry spans multiple rows, but when I do this it becomes very easy to make mistakes and to lose track of the data. It also becomes difficult to compare the data, since the measurements on the left and right side of the specimen are essentially the same thing and I cannot easily compare them if one specimen has a bone only preserved on the right side and the other specimen has the same bone preserved but only on the left side.</p>
  
  <p>I have also tried organizing the measurements into a separate sheet which could be accessed by a hyperlink from the main sheet, but this has also posed problems. Because in this case the measurement data still cannot be sorted by specimen number of species name, if a specimen number or species name changes (which it has in the past), I have to manually reorganize all the hyperlinks by hand.</p>
  
  <p>Finally, I have also tried adding an identifier to the multi-row entries, but this has a tendency to get screwed up if I sort the data, and it also mixes up any equations I use in the sheet. I might be doing it wrong somehow.</p>
  
  <p>The good news is I am not interested in sorting the specimens by measurements, so if there is any way to organize the table so it is sortable but the measurements cannot be sorted, that is fine. At the same time, because all specimens technically have a left and right side (plus the average measurement between them), I could also work with a system wherein each "entry" spanned a set number of rows or subrows.</p>
  
  <p>I was also wondering if it would be possible to write a macro to sort the data (especially since I am just sorting by the first five columns or so), or else do the database in some other program like Microsoft Access.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.</p>