I would like the ability to perform a “natural sort” that ignores leading articles (a, an, the). (I would like grouping to use the same logic.) The use case is that I have a database of books, and I would like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, for example, to appear in the A’s rather than the T’s. In Google Sheets I achieve this by creating a dedicated sort column with a function: REGEXREPLACE($B2, "^(A|An|The) ", "").
Page 1 / 1
I second this! It could easily be implemented as a toggle switch in the sort menu.
Do y’all know if there’s an answer yet for this?
There’s been no official answer to this topic (obviously), and no new feature yet that I know of. In the meantime, I’ve been sorting by a hidden formula field. Here’s an example formula from a book database including book series and title:
SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE({Series} & {Title}, "A ", ""), "An ", ""), "The ", ""), '"', "")
As you can see, it concatenates the series name and title and just deletes "A ", "An ", and "The " wherever it finds them.
Reply
Enter your E-mail address. We'll send you an e-mail with instructions to reset your password.