Table sort options greyed out in Publisher

[The-Design-Guy]

Not sure if I'm doing something wrong, but when I select a table and try to sort it, the sort options are greyed out.

Anyone else having the same problem?

[walt.farrell]

It doesn't look like you've selected the data in the column. Did you perhaps just right-click on the column header without left-clicking on it first to select the data?

(On Windows, the sort options are enabled even if the data isn't selected, whjch seems wrong. But nothing happens if one tries to sort with no data selected.)

[The-Design-Guy]

Thanks for the reply Walt!  I think you've steered me in the right direction. I had tried highlighting specific cells no avail, but when I left-click on the top column header the sort options do become active…IF…I don't have a header row. With a header row, I get a 'strange' selection, and the sort options are still greyed out. (See the attachements.) This is the same behavior whether Sort Options are set to include header rows or not. But, I'm thinking possibly my "merged-cell row" is not the same as a header row as defined by Affinity. If you have any insight on that, I would greatly appreciate it. 

If I remove the header row, then the sort options do become operable after left-clicking on the header (thank you for that guidance). 

I guess the way I would expect the sort to work would be for me to be able to select a group of continuous rows, click on the top of the column of the desired sort key and then have all the selected rows sort by that key. But I would certainly settle for the sort as you described if I could define non-sorting header rows and have it actually sort. 

 

[walt.farrell]

57 minutes ago, The-Design-Guy said:

But, I'm thinking possibly my "merged-cell row" is not the same as a header row as defined by Affinity. If you have any insight on that, I would greatly appreciate it. 

I suspect it's not a Header row, but I haven't played with that function in Publisher Tables yet. Sorry.

Glad to have helped get you closer, though, and if I come up with further thoughts I'll let you know

[The-Design-Guy]

Thanks Walt. After some more fooling with it, it appears my "header" rows are the problem. You don't actually have to left-click on the header column before doing the sort. You can just hover over it and select the sort order required. I guess my sorting "workaround" will be as follows: 1) Separate the cells in my header rows. 2) Temporarily put a space in front of the header title (to sort it at the top of the list). 3) Sort the table, 4) remove the header title space and remerge the cells in that row. 

I'm not sure what to do if there is more than one header row though. I've tried exporting the data to Numbers for sorting, but have not been able to get it back into Publisher in the correct cells. Publisher doesn't seem to support .cvs files which is kind of a serious omission for a program with tables (i.e. if you wanted to import data from a spreadsheet). I'm sure there's some workaround for that too, but I haven't found it. If this comes up in the future, I will probably just create separate tables for each header category.