Post History

You can't do that in Word.

Word's Sort command operates on "fields" in separate rows. It is nominally for Tables, but if the selected data is not in an actual Table then it treats each row of text as if it were a row of a Table. Note that each row here is a full Paragraph, defined by a hard return, *not* a line as defined by text flowing between margins.

There is an option for separating fields by commas, but that is for selecting which field within each row is sorted. For example, if your text is:

<pre>a,1,2
b,10,20
c,5,10
d,7,25
</pre>

then if you sort by Paragraph or by Field 1 then it will sort as shown. If you select Field 2 then it will sort to:

<pre>a,1,2
c,5,10
d,7,25
b,10,20
</pre>

and if you select Field 3 then it will sort to:

<pre>a,1,2
c,5,10
b,10,20
d,7,25
</pre>

It just doesn't seem to have any way to sort within a row. This is consistent with the general and historical usage of CSV/comma-delimited data as database data - each row is a record and sorting is typically via a numbered field within the rows.

If you have a large pre-existing data set consisting of a single long row of comma-delimited data, you can search/replace to change **,** to Paragraph Mark (select from Special or enter **^p**) and then Sort the results.