Excel - sort cells by no. of characters?

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13 January 2004, 09:17 AM

Brendan Hughes

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Another quick question!

Got this table full of text, 15 countries across the top, up to 40 text entries for each country going down.

Text entry size per cell can vary from 30 characters to 500. With word wrap on, this means the row height is always
set to the biggest entry. So there's lots of wasted space.

I'd love to sort each column so that the cell with the most characters is at the top (or bottom), so all the "fat" entries are
together, and all the sparse entries are together. It'll save row heights, and thus save pages when printing!

Can anyone suggest a way of doing that?

Many thanks

Brendan

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13 January 2004, 09:43 AM

DJ Dunk

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How about adding an extra temporary column containing the formula =LEN(A1) This will display the number of characters in a given cell. Then you can copy and paste the values over the top of the formulaes and sort by the temporary column