WRITE STUFF PRIMER: SORTING COLUMNS

by Ruth Seibert

This new "toy"called Write Stuff has been exciting and annoying at the same time.  Discovering new
features is great!  Figuring out how the darn thing works is a pain. And trying to unlearn old habits, or in
this case, commands, is frustrating.

One of the new items that I found was what I needed just at that time.  It is the feature of sorting
columns in your text.  This allows you to sort a list in alphabetical or numerical order, in ascending (A to
Z) or descending (Z to A) order.

In my case, I had to post a list of tennis players that had just finished a season of competition.  They had
earned points with each match and their totals showed who had finished in what order.

If you haven't used the sort feature, I'll cover it step by step so you can do it as I did (and it took me a
little while to figure it out).

The first thing is to type in your list or load it from your disk if you've already typed it.  I will use six
names as an example.

Polly Hunter   25
Susan Percy    34
Stacy Williams 29
Nancy Duncan   31
Fran Olmstead  33
Eva Brooks     32

NOW TO SORT:

1. Place the cursor on the first character of the column (P of Polly).
2. Tap CTRL key, then "e" to enter edit mode.
3. Use F5 key or "p" to "eat" each "paragraph."
4. Use CTRL "e" (or left arrow) to return from edit mode.
5. Now tap CTRL, then SHIFT "R".  At the top of the screen you see:

        "Restore &Sort <- A-->Z   Z-->A"

Since a descending order is wanted, move the cursor to Z-->A and press RETURN

Next you will see:


        "Sort on Column: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10"

Each group of characters is a column.  We have three: first name, last name and score.  The score is
what is to be sorted, so move the cursor to 3 and press RETURN.  Presto! The list pops onto the
screen with the scores in the order we want:

Susan Percy    34
Fran Olmstead  33
Eva Brooks     32
Nancy Duncan   31
Stacy Williams 29
Polly Hunter   25

If an alphabetical list is wanted, the column of sort would be 2.  The "eat text" feature used in sorting
places the data in a 9K buffer, so in the case of a very large list, you might have to do several partial
sorts and combine them.  It's an exceptionally useful function.  I can think of many ways that I could
have used this feature when I was teaching way back when.

If I can just figure out how to work some of the other Write Stuff features or how did I get what I got,
I'll have it conquered.

(Sorting is covered on page 23 of The Write Stuff manual; eating/restoring text on pages 12, 19 and 23. 
Every month or two the newsletter will publish instructional articles on using The Write Stuff.)

(From The Interface, newsletter of Fresno Commodore User Group, August 1988, via the
Commodore Information Center, http://home.att.net/~rmestel/commodore.html)