I have a large list of things produced, including their year and the serial start start and serial number end produced on each occasion. How can I display them in a sort order where years are first priority, then the serial number start?
For example I want row 8 to come before row 5, because obviously “58” come before “151” when looking at these numbers as a human.
I tried to make these two figures as an array, thinking it would look at the number as a whole and not one digit at a time, but I cannot sort by an array.
What I would do is split out the first serial number using an Extract Matching Text column, and then use that with the year in a math column to compute a single integer value to use for sorting.
Note that the formula would need to be adjusted based on the maximum number of digits in your serial numbers. For example, if the serial numbers had a maximum of 6 digits (which appears to be the case from your second screen shot), then you would use 10^7
Yes - this worked perfectly. Thank you so much. I have up to 8 digit numbers so I adjusted accordingly, and luckily I already had the start year as it own field - no need for extraction! I appreciate the answer
