Sorting Text in Ascending Order in InDesign CS

[Karen Swank]

Hello, I am a fairly comfortable InDesign CS user, but I've stumbled upon a question that I'm struggling to find an answer to. I've searched the forums here, but have been unable to find a similar posting to help me. Perhaps one of the experts that frequent this forum might be able to assist me?

Technical Data: InDesign CS, Win XP Pro

At the end of each of our Parts Manuals, we do an alphabetical parts listing by part description, then part number, then page number. Using the tabs palette and the leading feature of the tabs palette, this is a fairly simple task, except for one part - alphabetizing. I've looked at doing this in Excel, then importing the spreadsheet into InDesign, but I don't get the dot/period leading between the columns that I want. I need the information in the columns to move together - the part description, part number, and page number have to stay aligned. My question is thus: Is there a way to alphabetize columns of text within InDesign either within a table or more preferably, within a text box?

Perhaps I am missing a much better suited idea for doing this alphabetical parts listing... Any feedback or ideas are welcome.

Thanks!

Karen

[Olav_...@adobeforums.com]

Hi Karen--

You might take a look at the SortParagraphs.js example script (it's on your InDesign CS CD, or on the first "goodies" disc if you have the entire Creative Suite). It's intended to demonstrate how to move text, and will be very slow for large amounts of text, but it does sort paragraphs of text into alphabetical order.

Thanks,

Ole

[Karen Swank]

Thanks for the feedback - I'll give each solution a try and see which works best for our application.

Thanks again for the help,

Karen

[Rober...@adobeforums.com]

I just tried doing this in Word (which can sort paragraphs quite nicely).
I get leader dots too.

I just used leadered tabs in normal paragraphs for each line.

I saved it as a document and just placed it.

Rob