Excel Data Sort

After working fine for several years, I now get the message when trying a data sort in Excel 2004: "This operation requires the merged cells to be identically sized". How can I fix this???

In the column(s) you're trying to sort you have merged cells that run wider (or have been split) to more than a single column. There's no way excel can tell which column it belongs to and therefore how to sort it.

It's the curse of using merged/split calls for data. The way to resolve it is to remove the merged/split cells in the data you're wanting to sort

I get the same thing on a monthly ledger file. I use the same template to start the ledger for each month. But when I try to Copy and Paste (values only) the ending balance to the next month's beginning balance, both cells in the same column, that message pops up. The merged cells are obviously identically sized, but it just doesn't work. Sorry, wish I had a solution for you, and for me!

I'm not sure it ever worked for me, but you say it used to work. You could try replacing your Excel plist file, and if that doesn't work, reinstalling the whole program.

Usually, the merged cells are there because the text in them goes past the end of the cell and gets cut off, so the user merges the cells to increase the overall size. If you want to eliminate the merges, look for column headers, long text and text which covers more than one column. Select the merged cell and un-merge it.

Yes, but the issue here is, at the very least, that the error message contains false information. Rather than the operation requiring merged cells to be identically sized, it apparently requires that there are no merged cells.

Not really. If the entire set of data to be sorted were merged cells, as long as the cells merged the same number of columns/rows, then it would sort. So the message is technically correct, if typically useless (as MS is wont to do).

I don't know about the useless part Jake. I see where our President just hired the Microsoft Office 365 Guru to fix the broken healthcare.gov site!

Um, yeah, I noted that, chscag. In the interest of not starting a flame war about either healthcare.gov or MS, I'll try to restrain myself, but it struck me that perhaps MS is not the best place to go to get advice on a massive selling website? Amazon, eBay, WalMart, BestBuy, Home Depot, Lowe's, overstock.com, even Victoria's Secret could be better advisors on how to build a website to handle hundreds of thousands of users simultaneously, sell them stuff and then make sure money/information is transferred. But hey, MS makes a mean operating system, sort of.

MacInWin said:

If the entire set of data to be sorted were merged cells, as long as the cells merged the same number of columns/rows, then it would sort.

Click to expand...

Weeeell, you forgot to add YMMV.

As I stated in post #6

toMACsh said:

I get the same thing on a monthly ledger file. I use the same template to start the ledger for each month. But when I try to Copy and Paste (values only) the ending balance to the next month's beginning balance, both cells in the same column, that message pops up. The merged cells are obviously identically sized, but it just doesn't work.

Click to expand...

That's one cell at a time copied from one file and pasted to another, both files are from the same template, the cells are in the same column, albeit in a different row, but the row sizes are the same. It doesn't work. I get the same error message as the OP. There are unmerged cells in two columns between the two merged cells, but they are not part of the copy/paste attempt.

@toMACsh, My response was about sorting, not copy/paste. I have no idea why you get that error message on copy/paste. From your description, it sounds like a bug in Excel. I quit using Excel a few years ago, and was commenting on the sort issue from my experiences back then. I never had any problems with copy/paste, particularly when it was values only being copied.