How to sort by file extension in Excel?
If you have a list of file names which including different extensions, and now, you want to sort the file names by extension. Do you have any good ideas to solve this task in a worksheet?
Sort file names by extension with helper column
Sort file names by extension with helper column
In Excel, there is no direct way for you to sort the file extension, but you can apply a helper column to extract the extensions first, and then sort the rows based on that helper column. Please do as follows:
1. Enter this formula =REPLACE(RIGHT(A2,5),1,SEARCH(".",RIGHT(A2,5)),"") into a blank cell next to your data, see screenshot:
2. Then drag the fill handle over to the range that you want to contains this formula, and all the extensions have been extracted into column B, see screenshot:
3. And then select the extracted extensions in helper column B, then click Data > Sort, and check Expand the selection in the popped out Sort Warning dialog, see screenshots:
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4. In the Sort dialog box, select the column name which you want to sort by under the Column section, and then choose Values from the Sort On section, at last choose the sort order you need.
Note: if your data has headers, please check My data has headers option.
5. After finishing the setting in the Sort dialog, click OK to close the dialog, and now, you can see the file names have been sorted by the extensions as following screenshot shown:
6. Finally, you can delete the data in the helper column as you want.
Tip: In the above formula, A2 indicates the cell you want to extract the extension from.
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How to sort or filter data by strikethrough in Excel?
How to sort data by the most frequent value in Excel?
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