export canned reports and sort by date

Nice! 


Okay, so you have four problems that are preventing you from sorting:


1.) You have a lot of cells that are merged together

2.) There's a bunch of nonsense stuff up at the top of the document

3.) You have little tiny narrow rows in between the rows that actually contain data so that no two data-filled rows are actually adjacent to one another.

4.) Excel thinks your dates are numbers.


But we can fix all that


First: Select everything in the document. You can try cntrl+A, but it might not work. You may need to manually highlight everything. Then on the Home tab in Excel, just about in the center, you'll see a "Merge and Center" button with a little dropdown to the right. Click that dropdown and select "Unmerge." That fixes the first problem.


Next: Highlight the rows that don't have any meaningful data in them (title and all that) and delete it all so that Row 1 has actual data. Next, you should probably insert a new row above row 1 and give your data some column headings (name, date, etc.).


Next: Take a look at the row numbers. See how they skip from 1 to 3 to 5, etc.? That's because there are these little bity tiny rows between them that are so small you can't even see the numbers associated with them (which are of course, 2,4,6, etc.). So, first, click the box in the upper left hand of the document. It's the thing with a shaded arrow pointing to the lower right - it touches both row 1 and column A. This will highlight everything in your document. Now, hover your cursor over the boundary between row 1 and 2 until you see the cursor change to the 'resize row' kidn of cursor (thick black line with arrows pointing up and down). With the cursor placed exactly there, double click the mouse. This will expand all of the rows to the correct size. (this is also a handy trick when you would like to resize columsn so they actually fit hte data that's in them)


Now you've got the rows exapnded and managable. Next, select everything and sort by any column you want. This will push all of the blank rows down to the bottom. Now your data is all together in one place. 


Finally: This part is going to seem weird, but trust me on it. Highlight each row that contains date information. Next, hit cntrl+F to bring up the Find window. Click over to the tab in the Find window that says Replace. In the "Find What" box, enter a forward slash ( / ). In the Replace With box enter a dash ( - ). Hit Replace All. When you do this, Excel should immediately notice that these are dates and format them correctly. 


Now you can sort your data.