I have a word document which is 167 pages used for karaoke and it has all the song titles, artist, and song numbers listed in it. The problem is that I need to flip the artist and song name so that artist is listed first then song name then song number... is this possible? And, if so... after that is completed, would there be a way to alphabetize the artist column? I have attached the document so you can see what I am talking about a little more clearly.

Any help would be very much so appreciated.

Attached Files

KARAOKE1.doc (346.0 KB, 9 views)

See attached. I converted the document to a table (with a header row), then re-ordered the columns. Amongst other things, this makes it easier to sort the records by artist, title or number (I'll leave it to you to do the sorting). You can delete the cell borders if you don't want them.

Attached Files

KARAOKE.docx (245.7 KB, 10 views)

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Could you explain how you did that? Also, how would I sort the artist to the condescending song? and song number? Thanks alot for sorting that for me. But I have never used word to do a project like things.

I have been working on this for months and you did half for me in less than 24 hours.

Thank u so much!!!

Hi Moor215,

To convert the data to a table, I had to do extensive clean-up work first, removing 'headings' embedded in the data, multiple tabs & spaces between 'columns', and also at the ned of each line. Ultimately, each line ended up as basically 'text' tab 'text' tab 'text'. I then selected the whole document and used Word's 'convert text to table' function. Finally, I simply dragged the second column ahead of the first column. Took somewhat less than an hour.

Sorting is easy: Click anywhere in the table, then choose Table Tools > Layout > Sort and choose the sorting arrangement of your preference.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Wow... I can not thank you enough!! My karaoke books are gonna look great because of you. I've been stressing over this for just about 2 months.

Thanks again,
-David

Hi David,

FWIW, Excel is better suited to mainatining such a large table IMHO.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

What would I benefit from using Excel instead of word? i am just learning word, and excel...

Hi David,

For one thing, I suspect you've noticed that working with such a large table in Word slows it down dramatically. Excel, being designed to handle much larger data sets than this, would be far faster, especially at sorting the data & re-ordering the columns. It also has functions that can help you find duplicates quite easily, or help with extracting sub-sets of the data.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

incredibly slow... I still have about 9,000 songs to add to the document as well. So, yea I will need to get this to an excel document then. I think I might have it tho. Again, you have been a great help and I appreciate it.

Thanks,
-David