Displaying Records & Sorting Help

[raceware]

I am a complete novice to Access used an old dos program for years so bare with me. I have converted my old dos files to Access & I can't figure out how to have the records displayed in a "Sorted " fashion. We kept our records using what we call a Shop Order so for example 10-1000 for internal use which would breakdown the 10 being the year 2010 & the 1000 would be the first record for that year and we use the 10 prefix throughout the year only change the last 4 digits each time a new job is entered. What my dilemma is our oldest is lets say 91-1051 to present 10-1071 how can I get them to sort & display each time the Database is opened to be sorted & displayed in progression from 91-????, 92-???? & so on all the way to present 10-????. Any Hints?

[michaeljohnh]

Sorting by itself is a snap. A query can do this for you because there is a built in field call Sort which allows you to sort by ascending or descending order. Its the making of 90, 91, 92 etc come before 08,09,10 a little trickier.

A couple solutions would be to add a field to the table to hold the first two digits of the year. You would run an append query that populates the field with either a 19 or a 20 and then sort by that field.

Another possibility would be to create a concatonated field that prefixes 19 or 20 to the ticket number then sorts it that way.

If you like either of these ideas I can provide more detail.