2007 Microsoft® Office System Step by Step, Second Edition

Sorting Information in a Table

You can sort the information stored in a table based on the values in one or more fields, in either ascending or descending order. For example, you could sort customer information alphabetically by last name and then by first name. This would result in the order found in telephone books, as shown here:

Last	First
Smith	Denise
Smith	James
Smith	Jeff
Thompson	Ann
Thompson	Steve

Sorting a table groups all entries of one type together, which can be useful. For example, to qualify for a discount on postage, you might want to group customer records by postal code before printing mailing labels.

How Access Sorts

The concept of sorting seems quite intuitive, but sometimes your computer’s approach to such a concept is not so intuitive. ...