Microsoft KB Archive/210556

= ACC2000: How to Sort Titles Without Including the Leading Articles (The, A, or An) =

Article ID: 210556

Article Last Modified on 10/11/2006

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APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft Access 2000 Standard Edition

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This article was previously published under Q210556



Moderate: Requires basic macro, coding, and interoperability skills.

This article applies only to a Microsoft Access database (.mdb).



SUMMARY
This article shows you how to sort titles in text fields without including the leading articles "the," "a," or "an."



MORE INFORMATION
For example, take the following list of book titles:

Aztec Indians

The Ant People

Beast Man

The Baseball Club

An Attempt At Fun

Apple Valley

If you were to sort this list by using the custom function described in this article in a query, you would receive the following list:

The Ant People

Apple Valley

An Attempt At Fun

Aztec Indians

The Baseball Club

Beast Man

Microsoft provides programming examples for illustration only, without warranty either expressed or implied. This includes, but is not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. This article assumes that you are familiar with the programming language that is being demonstrated and with the tools that are used to create and to debug procedures. Microsoft support engineers can help explain the functionality of a particular procedure, but they will not modify these examples to provide added functionality or construct procedures to meet your specific requirements.

To have book titles returned without the leading article, create the following function: Option Explicit

Function GetTitle(Titles) As String

Dim sp As Integer

sp = InStr(1, Titles, Chr$(32)) If sp > 0 Then Select Case Left(Titles, sp - 1) Case "An", "A", "The"   ' add any other articles here! GetTitle = Mid(Titles, sp + 1) Case Else GetTitle = Titles End Select Else GetTitle = Titles End If

End Function To sort a table on the Titles field, create a query with the following two columns in the query grid:   Query -  Field: Sorted List: GetTitle([Titles]) Sort: Ascending Show: No  Field: [Titles] Show: Yes

The first column is a calculated field that extracts the text of the Titles field, but omits the leading article. The results of this calculation are sorted in ascending order. The first Show check box is cleared so that the query result shows the full title, including the leading articles.

