Rhyme or Reason for Custom Reports Sorting

One more minor MLS question- For some time as I’ve been creating and modifying custom reports for my ward and stake membership clerk callings, it’s been curious as to the logic behind the secondary sorting function of preferred names- the default (by last name). For my stake lists, we of course primarily want them sorted by ward, which automatically drops the preferred name feature to the secondary sorting level (although we can easily change that to another secondary feature, like age for the youth lists). But where is the logic behind the names not being sorted alphabetically? For some lists, it appears that very small blocks are sorted alphabetically; but then several others are inter-dispersed not alphabetically.
An insight on this quirk?

Are you putting the field you expect to sort on first in your custom report? In my experience, the default ordering is to sort by the first column. You can click on column headings after the report is generated to change that.

But it only seems to sort on the first column; the ordering of records after that is most likely based on some sort of internal ID.

See the Sorting section of the wiki article Custom reports for details.

Yes, I set the first column to be sorted by ward. So you’re saying there’s currently no feature to sort the secondary column of preferred names alphabetically? If not, I wonder how difficult it would be for the programmers to add this default? It seems a lot of stakes have custom reports where they would like them sorted first by ward, and secondly alphabetically.

jhigbee wrote:Yes, I set the first column to be sorted by ward. So you’re saying there’s currently no feature to sort the secondary column of preferred names alphabetically? If not, I wonder how difficult it would be for the programmers to add this default? It seems a lot of stakes have custom reports where they would like them sorted first by ward, and secondly alphabetically.

There is no feature to sort the report that way when it is first displayed. But it certainly can be sorted the way you want with only two more clicks, as was explained in the Sorting section I linked to.

I rather doubt that much development work is being put into MLS at this point, beyond the work that is necessary to integrate with changes being made in other Church systems such as CUBS and CDOL.

Thanks Bro. Brown for that additional feedback- sorry I didn’t take the time to open your link to Sorting the first time. I’ll look forward to trying that.