Hi, Richard. I have a partial understanding of this, I'll tell what I know.

Background: keep in mind the distinction between the outline, which holds 
all of your tasks, projects and folders in a definitive, hierarchical 
order, and views in which the items may be sorted into some entirely 
different (manual or programmed) order. The sort entailed in a particular 
view applies to that view only and does not affect the outline order.

The "Group & Sort" section of view properties affects the view sort but not 
the outline order. If you right-click a task to bring up the context menu, 
select Advanced a,d then "sort subtasks" this actually changes the outline 
order. Note that if you look at a hierarchical view there's a very good 
chance that you are seeing the tasks displayed in outline order, so you 
will see the effect of having sorted them. But it's important to understand 
that you are not sorting a view, you are sorting the outline. The change 
will be permanent and will affect the outline order across all views.

I am not certain but I think that the command is greyed out if any of the 
subtasks of the selected task are hidden in the current view. That would be 
consistent with your Show Completed > Recent filter. If there were any 
subtasks of the selected item that were *not* recently completed, they 
would be hidden. As a result, MLO would not necessarily have enough 
information to know where in the outline the hidden tasks should go when 
the subtasks get sorted.

One other ambiguous point: My understanding is that "manual sort" in the 
sort and group box enables a manual sorting, but that this just affects the 
view order and not the outline order. However a recent thread about 
cross-platform synching of manual sort suggested that for at least one view 
(I forget which one) the manual sort gets synched because it actually sorts 
the outline order. I have not had a chance to actually try this out.
-Dwight

On Sunday, January 18, 2015 at 9:27:29 AM UTC-5, Richard C wrote:
>
> I wanted to sort the sub-tasks of a folder into alphabetical order in a 
> hierarchical view.   Unfortunately,  the option on the Tasks Right Click 
> Menu,  Advanced Options was greyed out.    I have encountered this problem 
> before.
>
> Anyway, had a brain wave - the view had a filter Show Completed > Recent. 
>       I changed to a saved view which shows all the tasks (with no filter) 
> and the Sort option ungreyed and managed to sort my sub-tasks. 
>
> So I thought it must be something to do with the fact that the view was 
> filtered but when I changed the Show All Tasks view to filter in the same 
> way (ie Show Completed >  Recent) the Sort option remained available.
>
>
> So I am now really puzzled as to why the Sort Sub-Tasks is greyed out in 
> my original view  - as far as I can see the only filter I am applying is 
> the Show Completed > Recent.
>
> Does anybody know or have any suggestions as to why the Sort Sub-Tasks 
> should be greyed out in this way?
>
> Aside:  this is the big disadvantage of greying things out - one never 
> knows why they are greyed out.    You either want a hover tip to explain 
> why or something in the Help or to change the behaviour so that you get a 
> an error message when you select it that tells you why.
>
> Richard
>

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