Sorting Q
 

I have a file with groups in the format "1 Name of group" right up to 33. Now I want to sort them ascending, but OO Pro insists that 1 is followed by 10, 2 by 20 etc. this is wrong for my needs, I simply want it to sort ascending 1-33 and I just can't get it to work.
These groups have ICD-10 codes of the format e.g. I21.0 and I'd like those sorted ascending too. Is this possible, am I missing something?

If you want a text sort to behave as if it was a number sort, you'll just have to use 01, 02, 03 .. 09 in lieu of 1, 2, 3 etc.

(Otherwise, create a separate numeric column just for the numbers).

This applies to any software - it is not really an OmniOutliner issue.

This is OmniOutliner. Of course you can make it work :-)

One straightforward change would be to simply write your codes as Innn.nn which will allow the text sort to work:

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Or do it with just the numbers, but padded with leading zeros to the same width:

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Yet another option would be to add another column (the sort key) which will mirror the ICD-10 codes, except as a number, not text. Then you can sort on that sort key column and have your document be ordered the way you want. Or, if you wanted to elide the ICD-10 code from the outline proper for some reason, you could make the sort key column be the actual text code, written with the same padding/field width as above. Using a separate column for the sort key will allow you the greatest flexibility in what text you put in the outline.

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One minor subtlety that applies to the "sort key column" idea: the sorting won't move items out of their group in the outline. So if I changed the sort keys for items 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 to 31.0, 31.1, 31.2, they would still end up in the exact same place because they won't get moved out of their group. You can't use a column to yank the rows into a completely different ordering than the outline (a sorting by worldwide number of cases of each condition, for example).