Thank goodness for the little boys who grow up into 'puter geeks... :)
My son, having sorted out my husband's database (Star Office), had a few minutes to sort out mine. He looked at the mess long and hard and noticed that what was being sorted alphabetically was the last word (ie, Bodil, in "Torenhave, Bodil"; M in "Cook, Bridget M., etc)
Turns out, the puter is so smart that, when I decided to use "name" for the "author" field, it assumed that I'd type in "Jane SMITH", not "SMITH, Jane". So, I had two choices:either retype all the names in "everyday manner" instead of the "officialese", or change "name" to "text". Changed "name" to "text", this being a much simpler thing by far. And, lo and behold, at the next "sort by author" everything was as it should be...
I'm greatly relieved and will resume cataloguing ( I had given upin despair for a few days). Too bad my son's leaving tomorrow; I dare say I'll come up with with something new but equally stupid the moment he flies off to CA.
PS Thanks, Robin and Carol, for your suggestions. As it turned out, the bug was elsewhere... The possibility of a space in front of Torenhave flipping it up top was intriguing but unlikely. I have two entries under "Torenhave" (the book and its translation); my finger might have slipped once but chances of it doing the same thing twice were less. And it still wouldn't have explained why Stang was before Kortelahti and Voelcker before Löhr...
-- Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/ Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
- To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
