Two-Step Attribute Sorting

[MatthewGross]

Hello all,

I'm working on a GIS that highlights different lakes in my region. The lakes are already available as shapefiles, and the attribute tables include categories for lake name, county, and size. I need to select certain lakes out of the list, and the easiest way to do that is to sort by county, alphabetically, and then select the lakes from the list individually. However, when I sort the list by county, the lake names are obviously not alphabetical within each county.

If I was to do this in Excel, I could sort anything with multiple levels of categories. I tried to export the data to excel, sort via that method, add a "sorting # ID" to it and then do a join to the shapefile but for some reason, my self-made ID numbers don't append to the table?

Does anyone have any suggestions how to fix this or an easier way to go about it?

Thanks

[JoshuaBixby · Accepted solution]

Check out Sorting records in a table by multiple fields, see if it applies to your situation.

[MatthewGross]

That worked! Thanks a million. Learn something new everyday with this stuff.

[JoshuaBixby]

Matthew Gross​, I am glad you found something that worked.  It is customary to close out a question by marking a response "correct" if it answered your question.  In a case where multiple responses helped, it is common to mark the one you thought most helpful as correct and mark the other ones as helpful.

[MatthewGross]

Will do, in the future. Still figuring out all the functions on this forum. Thanks for your help again!

[curtvprice]

Tagging to Geoprocessing​ space