[Paul B]

Are there any Google Docs wads lurking on UKB (I'd imagine so).

I'm trying (hoping) to be able to sort some live data coming in from a form, firstly on one column of information but then on a second too. i.e. sort on criteria A but for those who have matching values for criteria A sort by B.

So far I've worked out that you need to duplicate the incoming data onto a second sheet as to not screw it all up 

Thanks in advance (probably to Slackers).

[slackline]

Not a fan of programming spreadsheets I'm afraid. I only really use it occassionally for capturing data and/or for work with colleagues who would use Excel in the first instance.

I then suck it into R using RGoogleDocs.  Wrote up how to do this here if that sounds like a possible avenue of interest.

[dave]

My experience of google docs is putting script into a spreadsheet so it emails off the contents of a contact form to a particular email address. I'm guessing you could use a script to manipulate the incoming data onto a target spreadsheet in a sorted order.

[Obi-Wan is lost...]

Do you want to automate it? Sorting manually is easy enough, select all the cells you want to sort, right click, 'Sort range...', pick your first sort column and 'add another sort column'. For some reason selecting the whole columns at the top doesn't allow you to 'sort range'. You have to select the cells, which could still be the whole column.

If you want to get more clever than this there may be something in the script gallery that can help. Found one that sorts form responses onto different sheets depending on the answer.

[Paul B]

Do you want to automate it? Sorting manually is easy enough, select all the cells you want to sort, right click, 'Sort range...', pick your first sort column and 'add another sort column'. For some reason selecting the whole columns at the top doesn't allow you to 'sort range'. You have to select the cells, which could still be the whole column.

If you want to get more clever than this there may be something in the script gallery that can help. Found one that sorts form responses onto different sheets depending on the answer.

Ideally yes (thus it won't need my input). For the same reason I'd like to keep it self contained (exporting to excel and running a macro would be simple enough).

This does it for one column:
http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/7211/how-can-i-make-some-data-on-a-google-spreadsheet-auto-sorting/25570#25570



Thinking about it more it would actually require 3 sorts, Sort by 'category' (A), Secondary criteria (B) and Tertiary criteria (C). Like Obi says this is fairly simple to do manually but it'd be nice to apply live, to incoming data!