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Nervous About Sorting
In the Help section, it says that if you sort, it will "override the values". That sounds like data may be lost. Exactly what values will be overriden?
Valid concern, Bill. Google puts a six-minute limit on its scripts, so a script could time out before it puts everything into the right place. Therefore, I recommend you duplicate a sheet and run the sort on a copy. Also, be aware that any subheadings or extraneous text (outside the identified rows) will be wiped out by the sort.
If Google times out midway, you have more data than it can handle in a single sheet. This can be worked around with several steps.
(1) Move half of the data to another sheet.
(2) Sort the two sheets individually.
(3) Then (sorry for this trouble), move all the A to M surnames into one sheet and the rest into another and sort them again. This will give you a properly sorted first half in one sheet and a last half in the other.
(4) Put the two halves together.
This will only be necessary for very large sheets. Perhaps Google will someday give us more than six minutes to finish a script.
