Are you one of those people who loves using colors to easily visualize your spreadsheet data? Well we have great news! Since March 2020, Google Sheets has added the ability to sort data based cell or text color. In this article, we will guide you through using this step by step.
Here we want those who attended in the list, which are highlighted in green, to be on the top of the data.
Now suppose your dataset uses colored text instead of a fill. Google Sheets also allows you to sort them, just follow this simple guide:
Remember to click in the column where your formatting is applied to. In our example, use column B since column A does not have text color formatting.
Pressing “blue” will bring all blue text to the top but will keep all the other text colors (dark green and red) mixed at the bottom. This happens because Sort By Color only applies to only the selected format it is used with. To be able to group all your colors together, follow the next set of instructions.
Let’s use the previous example where we already have our blue data on top.
For our example let’s choose dark green or our B grade range.
Since we only have three colors in our sample and blue has already been sorted, it will follow that red automatically sorts itself at the bottom. If you have more colors, simply repeat this procedure for each of the others.
Additional information: If we want our final output to be based on the grades that are A (either A+/-) then decreasing to the lowest grades (C+/-), our previous procedure will not be enough. To accomplish the right order, arrange your data again by the color blue to bring the A grades to the top.
An alternative way to do this in Google Sheets from the very beginning would’ve been to arrange by green before arranging by blue.
It is important to note that Google Sheets will not rearrange your sorted data alphabetically or in increasing order when using sort by text/fill color. In the output of our first example, you will see that the names are arranged by fill but still in the order of which they appear in the initial list. Follow the guide below to arrange this alphabetically.
This gives us our attendees arranged alphabetically. You can also arrange using both our text color and cell fill. Do this by sorting by the secondary format first (Say you want your final arrangement to be by cell fill but sub-arranged by text format: cell fill is your primary format and text color is your secondary format) and then your primary format last. Different orders of using sort by format may bring up a different arrangement which is why we have to be mindful before filtering our data.
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If you enjoyed this article, you might also like our article on how to set up Google Sheets sort by value function or our article on how to sort numbers in Google Sheets.
If you want to learn how to custom sort in Google Sheets or how to import CSV from email into Google Sheets, we also suggest checking out our detailed guide.
