Now again select the fields and Edit > Copy to put that into the copy/paste buffer. Now click on the “V” symbol just to the right of the column label “A” to produce the menu of options:Ĭhoose “Sort Ascending” and it’ll instantly sort all the values in alphabet order, A-Z. The result is that the first column will be filled with these values, and the table will actually increase in size as needed too: Now click on the top left cell (A1) and paste the list of words you’ve copied, either with the Cmd-V key sequence or with Edit > Paste. The table is added, and it’s pretty big, but don’t worry, we’ll get rid of it in a second. Now, with that in the copy/paste buffer click on a spot in your document where you can work or even pop open a new document for this task, then choose Insert > Table > Plain to add a basic table: The selected text will be your highlight color (mine is blue): The first step is to select all the text in the column with a click-drag-release gesture. To start, I’ll create a column of unsorted textual data, in this case related to Alice in Wonderland: Seriously, though, there is a way to sort a column of text, but it involves some fiddling and it’s tricky to get the data back to be just a column of text rather than be locked into the table formatting unit. I guess we’re supposed to just type things in alphabetically! Now you can’t convert a column of text to a one-column table and you can’t sort non-tabular data in the program.
![mac text edit alphabetize mac text edit alphabetize](https://media.idownloadblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/TextEdit-Preferences-New-Document.jpg)
For reasons that only Apple can answer, there are some features related to tables and sorting that have been removed from the most recent versions of the popular Pages alternative to Microsoft Word.