A reader recently confessed to exporting Word lists into Excel to sort them. That’s just too much trouble because Word can sort those lists for you. However, doing so isn’t exactly intuitive — the command you want is on the Table menu. To sort a list in Word, you have to treat the list like it’s part of a table, as follows:

  1. Select the list you want to sort.
  2. From the Table menu, choose Sort. For most lists, the default settings are adequate.





  1. Click OK and Word sorts the list.


This sort feature is flexible enough to handle text, numbers, and even dates. Simply change the Type setting to change the way Word evaluates the selected data — as text, numbers, or dates.