Sort and filter toggles are officially out, my friend. There is only one way you should be sorting your data, and I've got the scoop for you! Meet: the SORT function 🗂️.
Check out the gif above for an example! We've got a set of sales data, and we want to sort this data from the highest to the lowest sale amount so we can easily see who had the highest sales. Instead of adding the sort and filter toggles to the dataset and then sorting the data manually, we can use Excel's new SORT function! This function has four arguments:
- Array Argument: the data you want to sort
- Sort_Index Argument: the column that you want to sort by
- Sort_Order Argument: how you'd like to sort the data (1 = ascending order where -1 = descending order)
- By_Col Argument: whether you'd like to sort by row or column (if omitted, function defaults to sorting by row)
All we need to do to sort our data using the SORT function is select the cell where we want the sorted data to appear, enter the SORT function, and select the sales data as our array argument. Next, since we want to sort our data by sale amount, we need to enter a 2 as the sort index to indicate that we're sorting the data by the values in the 2nd column. Finally, we want our sorted data to appear in descending order (from highest to lowest), so we'll enter a "-1" as our sort order. Now we just enter the function and we're done! Congrats to Jackie Chan with the highest sales!!
