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Sorting by Places and Date
I have entered data for several men of the same name but in different communities/counties and years.
I would like to sort them so that the entries appear as County (for instance Allegheny) then communities in alphabetical order and in chronological order.
Example: Allegheny
Fayette
1800
1810
Pitt
1810
1820
Beaver
Bridgewater
1830
1840
New Sewickley
1820
1830
I have been able to do this successfully in Excel and, I think, Google Sheets, but when I do it here, it seems to sort each criteria separately so that my entries quadruple. What started out as about 50 entries is now 476 (actually way more than quadruple).
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I'm so sorry you're having this problem, Jane. I haven't seen the 90-60 duplicating records. If anyone else has, please let us know. Let me get some of the details clear, Jane. I might need you to share your sheet with me, or (better) to share a copy, so I can run experiments on your own material.
Here's what I want to get clarity around:
- Did your original sheet have header rows with the community name above sets of census data?
- Was the original sheet in the 90-60 format or was it copied in from your earlier Excel sheet? (Or were you pulling in a Early Federal Census Worksheet from Excel?)
- Did you run the sort once or multiple times, and did it complete each time or abort midway?
As the 90-60 is designed, you would run the sort utility once and get everything into community, county, state order. Then you'd need to create the headers for your communities one by one. When you run a sort, the headers disappear. If you want to regularly run sorts of this data, I'd recommend you separate your communities into separate tabs in the workbook.
Summing up, how about making a copy of your 90-60 and sharing it with me? Then let me know the answers to the above questions. Hopefully we can get to the bottom of it quickly. Thanks!
To wrap this up for any who are having similar problems, here are a couple of things to know about the Sort process in the 90-60:
- It's a lengthy process because it's having to handle two-line records--something spreadsheets don't do by nature. Make sure you give it plenty of time to run. There should be a status box in the top-right of your sheet while it runs. And you'll get a message when it has completed. Please know that it makes a full copy of your records to make this happen safely. If you abort the process before it's done, you'll find duplicates of your records at the bottom of the sheet. You can delete them.
- When you have the 90-60 utility extract what you put into the Location field to the separate fields of the Sort & Filter section, and it encounters extra spaces before or between terms, the spaces will be put into the Sort & Filter fields. When you sort, anything starting with a space will sort ahead of alphanumeric characters. If your sort seems to have put things in an odd order, look for space characters in front of your place terms. Remove them and re-sort. (Also make sure you separated your location terms with commas and not another punctuation mark.)
In a future update of the 90-60, I plan to (1) create a way to restore your sheet if you accidentally stop it before it's finished and (2) remove extra spaces in your location terms.
Thanks!
Donna
