Sorting Entries and Groups

You can sort project entries by property values. For example, if you sort project entries in descending order based on their inclusion state, entries included in the Workspace are placed at the top of the list, and excluded entries are placed at the end. Sorting these entries in ascending order places included entries at the end of the list.

Sorting entries respects the grouping of entries: the ungrouped entries are sorted, and the entries within each group are sorted, but there is no change in the order of the groups or in the group membership. If you want to sort groups, you can do so separately.

The order in which string values are sorted can be changed with a preference. By default, sequences of digits are treated as a single number, so that, for example, ligand10 follows ligand9 rather than ligand1. If you want a standard dictionary sort, you can set a preference in the Behavior settings section under Project Table in the Preferences Panel.

To sort all entries by a single property, right-click and hold in the property header (or click the arrow) and choose one of the Sort items from the shortcut menu.

To sort selected entries, to sort entries by more than one property, or to sort entry groups, you can use the Sort or Rank Project Table Panel. In this panel you can choose as many sort keys as you want, and specify the sort direction. The panel also offers grouping before sorting, sorting of groups, and entry selection after sorting.

To open the Sort or Rank Project Table Panel, choose Table → Sort or Rank .

If you want to sort groups, you can sort them by title or by the properties of their first entry. As well as sorting existing groups, you can create groups before sorting as part of the process.

Entries can be selected automatically from the top entries after sorting. The top entries are those with the lowest row numbers, which corresponds to choosing the entries with the highest or the lowest property values (depending on the sort direction) — or in general it corresponds to the order defined by the sort. You can select a specified number or percentage of entries, either from all the project entries or from the entries in each group. You can select the top entry in each group for each value of a chosen property, such as the title.

There are occasions when you may want to sort entries by a rank that is calculated as the optimum value of several properties, rather than sort them by properties independently. You can calculate a rank by the Pareto method for two to four properties, and then sort entries by this rank, in the Sort or Rank Project Table Panel.

To open this panel, do one of the following:

• In the Project Table panel, choose Table → Multivariate Ranking
• In the Project Table panel, choose Data → Add Property → Multivariate Ranking