How to Sort Data

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jdizzle83
Strange Fruit
Posts: 68
Joined: Tue Dec 11, 2012 3:06 am

How to Sort Data

Post by jdizzle83 »

Hey All. I'm wondering if anyone can help me out. I'm not necessarily interested in using Henrik's formula (as it sounds very complicated and all that), but I'm wondering how I can sort information to create a few lists of my own using either excel or google spreadsheets. For example, if I wanted to take just lists made from only this decade of the Best Albums of the 1980s (Pitchfork, Paste, Beats per Minute, Popblerd), assign #1's 100 points, #2's 99 points, and so on, and easily manipulate my data using a spreadsheet, how do I do that? (Not 100% sure that's how I'll do the points system, but want to figure out how to manipulate the data now anyway).

P.S. for those interested I will actually be using "Best of All Time" lists as well from this decade (Rolling Stone Top 500, NME Top 500, Consequence of Sound, Entertainment Weekly, Uncut PLUS the current acclaimed music rankings and the last all-time albums poll from site users in the forum) and ranking just the 80s albums from each. Why I'm doing this is...because I'm just nerdy and crazy!
Red Ant
Are You Experienced?
Posts: 44
Joined: Wed Jun 17, 2015 9:48 am

Re: How to Sort Data

Post by Red Ant »

I guess I’m doing something similar to what you are looking to do – I’ve been running a music database that includes my collection alongside inputs from various polls and lists for many years. It rather depends how confident you are with IT, as the route I use relies on Microsoft Access at its heart (I’ve been using MS Access since version 1, so didn’t have a learning curve when I moved from a proprietary database in the early 1990s). With that you can run queries on lists to extract subsets In the way you describe. I have a master list of tracks, owned or not, which has multiple fields for the various polls and lists that are being checked (the acclaimed list is one of those). You can then have a totals fields for each track which add in the various values from the lists, scaling them as required.
If you use Itunes you can also take all the data from that and import it into your database – e.g. ratings, playcounts. You can also generate playlists in your database and import them back into Itunes. You can also share the data in the database to and from Excel – e.g. I rank and sort my favourite tracks in Excel as it’s easier to sort and filter in there rather than in Access.
I use Office 365 home edition, which includes these tools.

If that all sounds too complicated I would look a bit closer into what you can do just with Excel - its amazingly powerful once you dig a bit deeper.
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