Sorting files by the order they were entered

[ronhontz]

I'm really new to Excel, working mostly with just a spreadsheet or two created with Borland Visual Dbase that I brought over to my new computer. I have pretty much figured out how to sort by just one column and even by mutiple colums but one thing has me absolutely bamboozled. I would like to sort by what Borland calls "record number" so that I can see the records in the order they were entered. I mailed a box of 40 videos I'd recorded for my niece's kids but, alas, it may have gotten lost in the mail. Unless I can order the records by how they were entered, I won't be able to tell which are the most-recent ones that need to be re-burned.

[ChemistB]

What are the column headers? I assume at this point, they have already been sorted by some criteria or you'd have record 1 in row 2, 2 in row 3, etc. Yes?

If you have already sorted and saved and there is no column with record number or date or time stamp, it's probably impossible to get them back into their original entered order. Let us know what data you've got and we'll try to help.

[ronhontz]

First off, it's a rather huge spreadsheet (over 25,000 records) that began, over in Borland, as a place to keep track of where to find various songs around my house. Over THERE, I had column A as with a header of Song Title; B with a header of "Artist", and C as "Source" for LP, cassette, or **. I would sort first by Artist and a sub-sort by Song Title. Since converting from Borland to Excel 2007, I no longer have headers, just columns A.B, C and I have taken to adding to this same spreadsheet both videos I've burned for my niece as well as audiobooks I've burned for my pal and a fourth column, D, which contains entries like "AB" or "Video", while A, B, and C _can_ contain the book or movie title, author's or actor's name , or anything elese I choose to enter. I have sorted (By D and then A then B perhaps), re-sorted (maybe B then A), and saved GAZILLIONS of times. I've noted that, should I run into a duplicate record and delete it's entire row, record number, say 25,125 will become number 25,124: they all move up. Now all I really would like to do is see them all displayed by the order in which they were entered.

[ChemistB]

Sorry, in order to track order entered, you would need to dedicate a column to either a sequential record number or date/time entered. Excel will not track by individual cell (or row) the order in which you entered things. :-/