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Article #32

Views (& Sorting): Who has 'em?

#32
From: Jonathan Eunice
Date: Wed, 04 Nov 1992 01:28
30 lines
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I frequently need to do analyses that rank (grade and sort) items in
several differnent ways.  Are there spreadsheets that have "views" or
other ways of working with multiple sort orders?  Eg, if I have the
following,

Product       Power    Ease of Use
----------------------------------
FlimFlam       5.6         6.7 
Flubdub        7.8         2.1
Pushmepullu    1.1         4.5 
ZapWap         4.9         6.6

I want one "view" sorted on "Power" and another sorted on "Ease of Use."

I haven't found one that does this task well.  I was simply going to
live with the problem until I recently saw a demo of Lotus' Improv
spreadsheet for the NeXT (and soon for MS Windows).  Its idea of
"views" onto data, and its ability to restructure data, does indeed
seem to be a fundamental improvement in the way spreadsheets work.  I
hoped views would extend to sort order, but alas, Improv views manage
with data structure, but not data contents.  

PS  I know I can copy the data into two spreadsheets, or two areas of one
    spreadsheet, then sort them.  This is a pill when I do updates, however,
    as the updates must be done multiple times, and with some risk of
    inconsistency.

PPS Setting up several spreadsheets with references to cells in a master
    database spreadsheet, then sorting the subsidiary spreadsheets, won't
    work.  (Don't believe me?  Ok, try it. ;-)
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From: jonathan@cs.pitt.edu (Jonathan Eunice)
Newsgroups: comp.apps.spreadsheets
Subject: Views (& Sorting): Who has 'em?
Message-ID: <JONATHAN.92Nov3202822@speedy.cs.pitt.edu>
Date: 4 Nov 92 01:28:22 GMT
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Organization: University of Pittsburgh Computer Science
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