Sorting in Hindi with MS Excel and MS Word

Introduction

While dealing with statistical data, it is often necessary to organize the data in such a manner that searching out a particular item later is easy. The simplest way to do this is with text is to arrange it in ascending or descending alphabetical order.

With Microsoft's Indic Language Computing packages, it is now possible to sort text in Indian languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Kannada etc using MS Office 2003. The purpose of this tutorial is to elaborate the procedure of sorting text in Hindi in MS Word and MS Excel.

Sorting in MS Word

In order to start sorting text in MS Word, you will first need to create a document with a table in it. To create a new MS Word document: Right click anywhere on the desktop Follow the 'New' tab Select 'Word Document' from the popup menu. To add a table to the document: Click "Table" on the Menu Bar Click "Insert " and choose "Table" Enter the number of rows and columns you want the table to have

You are now ready to enter data. Enter data in Hindi using one of the available Hindi keyboard layouts. For more information on this refer to the tutorial on how to use the Hindi IME from BhashaIndia in the Hindi section on the BhashaIndia site. For the tutorial we entered data both in Hindi and English, in order to compare the differences in sorting in the two languages.

To sort the data: Select the table by clicking on the cross (+) in the top left corner of the table. This will cause the table to be displayed in inverted colors Now, click "Table" on the Menu Bar, and from the drop down, select "Sort". In order to sort on a particular column, select that column from the dialog that pops up. The result on sorting in English is this: The result on sorting in Hindi is this:

Sorting in MS Excel

In order to start sorting text in MS Excel, you will first need to create an MS Excel Worksheet

To create a new MS Excel Worksheet: Right click anywhere on the desktop Follow the 'New' tab Select 'Microsoft Excel Worksheet' from the popup menu.

Entering data in MS Excel in Hindi is just the same as entering data in an MS Word table. We entered the same data as above for the MS Excel example as well.

Once you have entered the data you should see something like this.

You are now ready to sort the data. To sort data in MS Excel: Right Click on the first block of the second row, i.e. the one that reads 1. Now click insert on the popup menu to insert a blank row at the beginning of the data. Once you have inserted the blank row, select the entire block of cells, including the two blank ones. Now, click on "Data" on the Menu Bar. Choose "Sort" from the drop down list. Choose which column to sort on from the dialog box that pops up. You can also choose whether to sort ascending or descending. Sorting by the English alphabet gives this Sorting by Hindi gives this Once you are comfortable with the procedure, you can then sort larger and more complex data sets as well.