If you have a long, but relatively simple and consistent, list of words in Microsoft Word you can highlight the list selection and use the “Sort” icon on the toolbar to re-order the list. However, what if the list contains multiple words per line; say for example a list of first name and last names each separated by a space? How would you go about sorting this list?

One idea might be to copy the list into Microsoft Excel, sort it there, and paste it back. We could also convert the names to a table, then mess about with it for a while, then convert the table back to text but there is a simpler way. It is possible to tell Word to sort the list by last name, in this scenario, and in this blog article we will look how we can achieve this.

To kick off let’s take a relatively short list of random names in the format: First name, then a space, then Last name, e.g “Fred Smith“.