Sorting data obtained through formulas

[openroad]

Sorry, I am not sure which subforum this question is best suited to...hope it's OK here.

I will preface this by saying I REALLY don't know much about Excel, I set up my sheet through a lot of web research!

I have an accounting spreadsheet set up with one tab that is a simple, long list of all sales of various products, and another tab that use array formulas to calculate the amount of money earned for each product. I'd like to be able to sort this data so I can quickly see what the top earners are.

Product names are in rows, and the month and final total are in the columns. Simply selecting the all the data and trying to sort by a column doesn't always work. A friend of mine who is more experienced in Excel (but who didn't have time to look at my sheet in-depth) said maybe it didn't work because all the data is from formulas...like if product #1 earned $100, that $100 is not actually typed as text into the cell but is just a formula that produces that number. When I try to sort by column, the results are random. Some of the income totals switch to the wrong product names, and the totals definitely don't sort into any kind of order.

Oddly, sorting seems to be working on the "number sold" tab, just not on the "income" tab. But the array formulas are basically the same! The only difference is that the formulas are searching for different columns from the same sales LIST sheet, one looks for income and one looks for the numbers sold.

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Of course, I would really like to be able to sort both tabs, as selling 200 pieces of a $2 product, or 10 pieces of a $80 product gives different useful information.

Sorry if the question doesn't make that much sense...as I said I'm not very experienced with this.

[Pepe Le Mokko]

Hi
perhaps post a small sample of your data showing where it goes wrong. The fact that you are sorting by results is of no consequence in itself, but the output format might be a problem ( text instead of numbers)

[openroad]

Hi, by "small sample" do you mean as an attachment? Or like...pasted into this box? I don't know what the usual procedure is here for doing that. Thanks!