Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Ignoring Selected Words when Sorting.
Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated June 4, 2022)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016
Arn has a need to exclude certain words when sorting a column. For instance, he is trying to exclude "The" when sorting a list of movie titles, so that "Alpha, Charlie, The Bravo" would sort as "Alpha, The Bravo, Charlie."
There is no built-in way to do this. The best solution is to set up an intermediate column for your data. This column can contain the modified movie titles, and you can sort by the contents of the column. For instance, if column A contains your original movie titles, you could fill column B with formulas, such as this:
=IF(LEFT(A1,4)="The ",MID(A1,5,LEN(A1)-4),A1)
This formula will strip the word "The" (with its trailing space) from the start of the line. If you want to add the word "The" at the end of the string, then you could modify the formula in the following manner:
=IF(LEFT(A1,4)="The ",MID(A1,5,50),A1) & ", The"
If you wanted to delete all instances of the word "the" without regard to where it appeared in the title, you could use the following instead:
=SUBSTITUTE(A1,"the ","")
Sorting, again, would be done by the results shown in column B. This will give the list in the desired order.
ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (11976) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Ignoring Selected Words when Sorting.
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Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here:
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