I do a lot of custom sorts in Excel 2016 on Win 10. I can easily open up the custom sort dialog box using the ribbon shortcuts using Vocola/Caster, and in the dialog box I can add/delete/etc sort levels.  But I can't figure out how to use the keyboard to actually pick the fields I want to sort on.  I know this was possible in earlier versions of Excel.  I'm also a bit surprised; Office is mostly great at giving you ways to manipulate things using the keyboard.

Has anyone been able to make this work?  Even using tabbing doesn't get there; neither do click commands.  And the Dragon command browser doesn't seem to have any built in voice commands.  If I have to I'll create a mouse command to do it; I try to avoid them given that I work on multiple machines that don't have the same screen size.

 

Thanks!

Anders

You have probably already tried this but have you tried pressing Alt+w, s, a ect...?

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Not entirely sure what you mean, Lunis; why would pressing alt w work? I did try it, and it didn't seem to do anything.

If you are looking for a way to select a range of cells, here are two approaches:

The mouthful method:

"select cell alpha one through cell alpha ten"

You must say the word "cell" twice. You may need to substitute the word "to" for "through." Although you don't need to use the military alphabet to specify the columns, doing so really helps. You cannot pause at any point, no matter how many syllables there are.

The F8 method

In Excel, pressing F8 causes cells to be selected by pressing the arrow keys.

"go to cell Alpha 1"
"press F8"
"move down 10 lines"

Thanks for the info about selecting cells, but that's not the problem. The problem is that when I call up the custom sort dialog box, which allows you to sort by more than one field, I can't find any way to navigate by keyboard that will let me set which fields Excel should sort by.

Or do you mean this dialog box?

The drop down lists are opened by pressing Alt + down or Alt + up.

Yes, that's exactly what I was looking for!

I'm off my computer for the next couple of days to rest my voice, but I'll try it out on Monday. Thank you so much!

Another option: say "press F4" (or "press Function 4").

Or you might be able to say "drop list" to, well, drop the list.

Problem solved! The problem I was running into was that I couldn't use tabs or any other keyboard shorts to move the cursor to one of the sort fields. Now I can -- I can get there with tabs no problem.

Every once in a while Excel starts behaving weirdly. I could have sworn I had restarted my computer several times and still had the problem, but either I hadn't or something else was going on. In any case, it now works just fine.  

Thanks for your efforts to help me; sorry I ended up eating up your time.

Anders's