You could do it with a macro!

Copy and paste the data (I take it that it's in a table)



Record new macro
Highlight the entire table (hover the mouse just ABOVE the table until it turns into a black arrow pointing downwards - click and hold as you move it over all the columns until highlighted)
Click Sort (or Data > Sort)
Choose the column to sort by
Stop the macro

Now you can run the macro each time you paste the data!

Thanks for the suggestion but the text is not diplayed in a table, it is standard text with each chunk of text as a paragraph. Ill used the excel suggestion on a couple of matches and it works good so will stick with that just now.