Beej, you need to unmerge the cells. Then you can sort. Highlight them all, go to Format Cells, and there should be a button that has "merge cells" checked, and you need to uncheck it.

For me, doing mailmerge out of a Word table works better, actually.

I can't deal with word tables for some reason. How would that work? If I need a table in word, I usually make it in excel and import it!

I think I have a weird learning curve, though, because I learned to do anything mail mergy with Filemaker, and then moved to an environment where form letters are created by manually typing in the person's name, then hitting print. I tend to know there is a better way, but really have to persevere to figure it out. Before this job, the only Microsoft product that I used for anything was Excel.

I think it's all a matter of the tool you're most comfortable with. To me, inputting a lot of data is easier in Word, in part because you can just use tabs or make a comma-delimited file, then say "convert text to table." Mail merge is based on the title of each column, so you can set up addresses the way you can from Access and the like. You can sort alphabetically by, for example, a "LastName" column. You can also apply an assortment of math functions to number columns.

I never thought of the "text to table" thing!

meara (and all of you), thanks to infinity.

I've never seen the merge cells checkbox and had to drill down a bit to find it. It wasn't even actually checked, oddly enough, but had a - sign in it.

Duly unchecked, I now have a perfectly sorted list and a tremendous sense of relief.

Thankee!

WoooHooo! The Gigabyte fairies came by and sprinkled some expansion dust on my .mac account since 2am. Now at 10 Gig's instead of 1. A full 10 days ahead of schedule. :)

Maybe they are doing it alphabetically by account name (good to be a B!)

I hate Cafe Press. Would anyone be able recommend an alternative?

My PowerBook won't, well, power on.

If I pop out the battery, plug it into the wall and hit the power button I hear a hard drive whir, it plays a chord, and then is silent.

I must be overlooking something painfully obvious, right? But what?

It seems stupid, but is it possible for some reason it's defaulting to the screen being all the way down in contrast?

If it's really chording and then not powering on (as in, capslock button doesn't light up or anything) then... no, you're probably not missing something painfully obvious. Something bad is happening. I'm not sure how Macs deal with dead hard drives - never really experienced one, despite many other problems - but it might be worth trying to boot from some sort of bootable CD, if you've got one.

I left it alone for an hour, and now it's working again.

I don't have the energy to work out why, but thanks for giving it a shot.