Order a column based on another column

Question

I want to order Column A based on the values of Column B.

In Google Sheets that is simply: =SORT(A1:A100,B1:B100,TRUE)

How to do that in Excel?

Answer 1

To do it manually, you can highlight all the columns you want sorted, then click "Custom Sort..." under "Sort & Filter" in the "Home" tab. This brings up a dialog where you can tell it what column to sort by, add multiple sort levels, etc.

If you know how to do something manually in Excel and want to find out how to do it programmatically using VBA, you can simply record a macro of yourself doing it manually and then look at the source code it generates. I did this to sort columns A and B based on column B and pulled the relevant code from what was generated:

ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets("Sheet1").Sort.SortFields.Clear
ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets("Sheet1").Sort.SortFields.Add Key:=Range("B1:B6"), _
    SortOn:=xlSortOnValues, Order:=xlAscending, DataOption:=xlSortNormal
With ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets("Sheet1").Sort
    .SetRange Range("A1:B6")
    .Header = xlGuess
    .MatchCase = False
    .Orientation = xlTopToBottom
    .SortMethod = xlPinYin
    .Apply

Note that the automatically generated code almost always has unnecessary bloat though. But, it's a nice way to figure out what functions you might need to use or research more. In this case, you could trim it down to something like this:

Range("A1:B6").Sort Key1:=Range("B1:B6"), Order1:=xlAscending

If you only want to reorder the contents of column A without touching column B (even though you're using it as the sort key), you probably need to make a temporary copy, sort it, and copy back only column A. This is because Excel's Sort function requires the sort key to be in the range being sorted. So, it might look like this:

Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Range("A1:B6").Copy Destination:=Range("G1:H6")
Range("G1:H6").Sort Key1:=Range("H1:H6"), Order1:=xlAscending
Range("G1:G6").Copy Destination:=Range("A1:A6")
Range("G1:H6").Clear
Application.ScreenUpdating = True