Putting a list in order should take a second, not a trip to a spreadsheet. Paste your lines, choose how you want them ordered and copy the result. It works for names, products, keywords, file names, numbers or anything else that fits on a line.
The sort orders
A to Z is the familiar alphabetical order, and Z to A reverses it. Accented letters are sorted with their base letters, so é doesn’t get thrown to the end of the list.
Number, low to high and high to low sort by the first number found on each line. That means a list like “3 apples”, “12 pears” and “7 plums” is ordered by 3, 7 and 12 rather than by the letter after the number. Decimals and negative numbers are understood. If two lines have the same number, they fall back to alphabetical order.
Length, short to long and long to short put the shortest or longest lines first. It’s a useful way to find outliers, such as unusually long product titles that may be cut off in a listing.
Reverse the current order simply flips your list upside down, last line first. It doesn’t alphabetise anything.
Shuffle randomly mixes the lines into a random order each time. Use it for picking a random winner, mixing quiz questions or making a playlist order. Because the shuffle is random, you’ll get a different result every time you press Generate again or tweak a setting.
The extra options
Ignore upper and lower case is on by default so that capitalisation doesn’t split your list into two groups. Without it, strict ordering can put all capitalised lines before lowercase ones, which surprises people.
Natural order makes numbers in text sort the way you’d expect: file2 before file10. Without it the computer compares character by character, and “file10” lands before “file2”. Leave this on for almost everything.
Trim spaces removes spaces at the start and end of each line. Hidden leading spaces are a classic cause of lists that look mis-sorted, because a line starting with a space jumps to the top. Trimming fixes that.
Remove empty lines drops blank lines, which otherwise gather at the top of an A to Z sort.
Good uses for it
- Alphabetising names, glossary terms and reference lists.
- Preparing keyword lists so similar phrases sit together, which makes duplicates easy to see. Follow up with remove duplicate lines to delete them.
- Ordering numbered items like invoices, scores or prices.
- Spotting very long or very short lines in titles, descriptions and headlines.
- Randomising, such as drawing lots, choosing the speaking order or shuffling flashcards.
- Organising lists of file names or URLs before pasting them into documentation.
Sorting tips
If your list has several columns, the whole line is sorted by its start, so put the column you care about first. Copy it out of a spreadsheet, sort it here and paste it back, or sort inside the spreadsheet if you need to keep columns aligned.
To sort headings that start with “The” or “A” ignoring those words, edit the list first with find and replace, for example removing a leading “The “.
For lists with a mix of formats, run add text to each line afterwards to wrap each item in quotes or add numbers once the order is final.
After sorting
Sorted lists are easy to compare and clean. Number them with add line numbers, or compare two sorted lists to see what they share with compare two lists. If your list started as one long comma-separated string, split it into lines with the text splitter before sorting, and use filter lines to throw out the entries you do not need.