ACC2000: How to Sort Titles Without Including the Leading Articles (The, A, or An)

ID: Q210556

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Access 2000

Moderate: Requires basic macro, coding, and interoperability skills.

This article applies only to a Microsoft Access database (.mdb).

SUMMARY

This article shows you how to sort titles in text fields without including the leading articles "the," "a," or "an."

MORE INFORMATION

For example, take the following list of book titles:

Aztec Indians
The Ant People
Beast Man
The Baseball Club
An Attempt At Fun
Apple Valley

If you were to sort this list by using the custom function described in this article in a query, you would receive the following list:

The Ant People
Apple Valley
An Attempt At Fun
Aztec Indians
The Baseball Club
Beast Man

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To have book titles returned without the leading article, create the following function:


Option Explicit

Function GetTitle(Titles) As String

   Dim sp As Integer

   sp = InStr(1, Titles, Chr$(32))
   If sp > 0 Then
      Select Case Left(Titles, sp - 1)
         Case "An", "A", "The"    ' add any other articles here!
            GetTitle = Mid(Titles, sp + 1)
         Case Else
            GetTitle = Titles
      End Select
   Else
       GetTitle = Titles
   End If

End Function

To sort a table on the Titles field, create a query with the following two columns in the query grid:


   Query
   -----
   Field: Sorted List: GetTitle([Titles])
      Sort: Ascending
      Show: No
   Field: [Titles]
      Show: Yes

The first column is a calculated field that extracts the text of the Titles field, but omits the leading article. The results of this calculation are sorted in ascending order. The first Show check box is cleared so that the query result shows the full title, including the leading articles.

REFERENCES

For additional information about parsing strings, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q209045 ACC2000: Sample Expressions to Extract Portion of Text String

Additional query words: inf titles sort strip left

Keywords : kbprg AccCon
Version : WINDOWS:2000
Platform : WINDOWS
Issue type : kbhowto