Sometimes you are required to sort the detailed data in a spreadsheet. However, the sorting is difficult to realize due to the inflexible operation in Excel. You have to sort the data by groups, which requires quite a lot of work.
But you can perform the operation more easily in esCalc. Let’s look at an example. Summarize sales amount according to the clients, with each group of data being sorted by the dates, and compute the growth rate of each contract:
If you want to further select the top contracts according to amount or quantity of the product, you need to re-sort the data by Amount or Quantity.
Sort the data by Amount, for example, you just need to click “Quick operation->Desc” on the right-click menu on column D:
Thus only one step is sufficient to sort the grouped data, as shown in the following figure:
Based on the current data, you can perform the next step of computation freely and hit the mark directly, instead of managing to avoid the obstacle you met. The computation becomes really flexible.
It is much more difficult to perform the same computation in Excel. The reason is that Excel doesn’t support sorting grouped data. So you have to dismiss the groups, sort data by Client and Amount, and finally re-sort data By Client and sum up Amount. Each sorting will repeat the series of actions, which are really troublesome. You should also note that the formulas in column F should be converted to “Values” in advance in order to ensure the data of growth rate in column F are correct.
In addition to sorting, esCalc is more convenient than Excel in many other aspects. The growth rates in column F in this case, for instance, cannot be computed in one step in Excel, but this can be realized in esCalc. To sort column F after the growth rates are worked out, it is no necessary for esCalc to make special processing, but in Excel, the formulas in it need to be converted to “Values”. In fact, the various difficulties you’ll met when performing sorting, re-grouping or computation on columns based on the current data will all be solved easily in esCalc.