[coolrunning]

Hi,

I'm new to this forum but though I'd share a newfound solution to a problem I'd been having for a long time, which may save people asking questions about this in the future. I have a spreadsheet of compounds along with various properties and common uses etc... which I like to be able to sort by use, or molucular mass for example.

My problem was that I could easily sort those sorts of thing, but when it came to sorting the compound names themselves I was stuck!!!! Has anyone else had this problem? Anyway, I thought there might be something in Excel you could use to help, and after literally DAYS of searching the Web I stumbled cross a little known add in for excel called 'Chemical Sorting' which lets you ignore parts of the name like hyphens, commas, brackets, numbers and single letters. I think it's basically a normal sort with the capability of ignoring what you want. Oh, you can also ignore italics and bold - which was REALLY useful I found when it came to names beginning 'tert' or 'exo' etc.

Anyway, there you go! If anyone has similar experiences, let me know. In the meantime, heres the link to the tool if you're interested (use copy and paste because the link is split for some reason :s):

http://uk.geocities.com/chrisdjames1@btinternet.com/ChemicalSorting.zip

edit: tried to correct url, there is a bug in forums code preventing it from being displayed correctly. But then, who uses @ in urls?