SORTBY newb... Other solutions don't appear to apply??

Hello all! Okay, here is the situation. I have an Excel spreadsheet and each row has a dropdown that allows you to set the priority of the task. The dropdown has approximately six separate items...

excel

m_tarler

Bronze Contributor

Nov 06, 2025

so if the issue is that the regular sort and quick sort options are only alphanumeric based options (i.e. urgent, high, medium would be sorted either high, med, urgent or urgent, med, high based on alphabetical) then a simple option is to add another column and substitute numbers for the critical levels using XMATCH:

=XMATCH([critical level], {"Urgent","High","Medium","Low"})

I would make that critical level a list on a sheet and/or a Name so then you can make sure the same list is used for the drop down and the XMATCH

=XMATCH( [critical level], Critical_List )

then you can easily sort by that value column