Sorting Journal Report for Multiple People

[John K 0]

I am frustrated by the limited number of options provided in the "Sort By" tab for Journal Report Options. Is it possible to sort the people in a journal report in any other manner? Ideally I would like to manually select a sort order, but it would even be helpful if I could use the listed options in reverse order (so, for example, that the report begins with surname that start with "Z"s, rather than "A"s.)

 

I do see that I could create my own custom sort order by revising the ID Numbers or Reference field for each person, but that would create other issues that I do not want to deal with.

 

 

[Terry Reigel 0]

I too find that the available sort options seldom do what I want. My solution has been to use the Reference Field since I don't use it for anything else - I manually enter numbers to force the sort.

 

When doing that remember that it uses an alphabetic sort, so 11, 12, etc. sort before 20 and 21, for example. So don't mix one, two and three digit numbers.

[Susan Moore 0]

I actually use the reference field with the pattern of 1-8 for the first digit representing the family line of my great-grandparents, followed by the first letter of their surname (just to make it easier to remember), then a dash and the TMG ID number in a five digit format with leading zeros. Some of the people in our user group with more people use a six digit ID number instead of five.

 

I sort by reference number but select by a flag called Book Order set to Y. This does require the ID numbers to be in the correct sequence but only within each of my 8 lines because the first digit of the reference number takes care of the chapter sort for each line.

 

To determine the Book Order values I use the ahnentafel numbers with an Excel spreadsheet up to 20 generations and then manually figure out the higher generations which sounds complicated I know, but most people do not have that many lines beyond 20 generations. I am looking for the twigs that would not be picked-up by another report.

 

Susan Moore