[X4U] Pages Question

[Daly Jessup]

>I have a problem with Pages and I am not sure how to solve it and I 
>thought maybe there are some experts here that could help me out.
>
>I have a 1 Page Pages document which contains a lot of medical 
>information on it. The part that that I really need some help with 
>is medications. I have a 2 column table which contains (my list of 
>medications (currently around 16). This list doesn't change a lot 
>but lets say every two months . The entry in each box is a 
>medication. The problem has arisen that the doctors office keeps the 
>meds in alpha sequence and it takes for ever to go through the list. 
>Is there away to sort say on the first 5 characters (name of med) ?
>
>I know I can do it manually but having to do this every two months 
>is not a chore I want to do. Can pages be made to sort the columns, 
>so the medications are in reasonably close alpa sequence?
>It would seem straight forward that one should be able to do. I am 
>pretty sure WP can do it (I will have to admit I have not tried it 
>but somewhere back in the mists they had a facility to do so.

Ed,
This is covered nicely in Pages Help, which would be faster than 
waiting for the list to answer.

But anyway, click in any data cell in your table. Open the Inspector, 
go to the Table tab.
In the menu next to "Edit Rows and Columns," choose "Sort ascending" 
or "Sort Descending," as you prefer.

Another thing you can do, if you can make it work (which I can't) is 
to make your table in Numbers and save the Numbers file. Then select 
the table in Numbers and paste it into your Pages document and save 
the Pages document. Then when you change the table in Numbers (and 
save) supposedly you can then select the pasted table in Pages, and a 
"Refresh" button is supposed to come up, which will update the table 
in Pages.

(Does anyone get that "Refresh" button when selecting a linked table in Pages?)

Or, you could make the whole document in Numbers, putting your text 
into text boxes, and keeping your meds data in a Numbers table, where 
you can do all kinds of spreadsheet-type operations on it.

But if all you need is a simple sort, it's right there in Pages, in 
the Table inspector.

Daly
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