How do you link rows in Excel so they will stay together?

Suppose you have multiple columns in a worksheet, now you want to sort a column and keep its intact rows order as below screenshot shown. Here I will tell you some ways to solve this problem in Excel.

Sort a column but keep rows by Sort function

In Excel, you can use the Sort function to sort a column and keep rows.

1. Select the column data you want to sort, and then click Data > Sort. See screenshot:

2. In the Sort Warning dialog, keep Expand the selection option checked, and click Sort.

3. In the Sort dialog, specify the criterion that you will sort on and the sorting order. See screenshot:

4. Click OK. Now the selected column has been sorted and the intact rows are still kept.

If you want to sort the column data based on the absolute values, the Sort function of Excel cannot directly help you sort them. Now I introduce the Advanced Sort of Kutools for Excel for you.

Sort a column but keep rows by Advanced Sort function

With Kutools for Excel’s Advanced Sort function, you can sort data by absolute value, month, day, frequency, last name and so on.

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After installing Kutools for Excel, please do as below:（Free Download Kutools for Excel Now!)

1. Select all the data range and then click Kutools Plust > Sort > Advanced Sort. See screenshot:

2. In the Advanced Sort dialog, select the column you want to sort, and then select the criterion you want to sort on, then select the sorting order. See screenshot:

3. Click Ok. Now the selected column data has been sorted with intact rows kept.

If you are interested in Kutools for Excel’s Advanced Sort utility, you can click here to know more detail about this utility.

  Advanced Sort

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EK

about 4 years ago

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The screen capture for step 2. In the Sort Warning dialog, keep Expand the selection option checked, and click Sort. needs to show "Expand the selection"

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Bill

about 2 years ago

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Only sorted column selected didn't bring along rows...useless

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Sunny     Bill

about 2 years ago

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check Expand the selecton option in the Sort Warning dialog, it can sort the relatied rows together.

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ed

about 2 years ago

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"Intact rows" - what is that???
I can't tell you how incredibly MORE helpful this would be if you had used text in... whatever remained unsorted. As it is I have NO idea what you are trying to illustrate- it's just a jumble of random numbers.

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Edna     ed

about 1 year ago

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If you can't tell the difference with the numbers, I don't know that you'd know the difference with text either. If you look at the surrounding columns, it's clear that when the numbers from a specific column were sorted, the numbers from the rest of the columns stayed in the same row relative to the numbers they were trying to sort. So instead of one column's information being sorted, each entire row was sorted based of information in one column.

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Kirt

about 3 months ago

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I found a solution. I'm on a mac and copy and pasted my excel data to the free Mac "Numbers" spreadsheet. I sorted the data there by the column and it kept all of the rows linked to the sort. Then I pasted it back into excel. Excel is broken and no matter what I try, it will not keep text columns rows correlated to a sort on other columns containing numbers. I don't trust it. But, after all, why should I have expected to: it's a MS app.

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