OrderBy Property

OrderBy Property

See Also                  Applies To

You can use the OrderBy property to specify how you want to sort records in a form, query, report, or table.

Note   In a Microsoft Access project (.adp), this property is ignored. To set the sort order, you must use the ServerFilter property.

Setting

The OrderBy property is a string expression that is the name of the field or fields on which you want to sort records. When you use more than one field name, separate the names with a comma (,).

When you set the OrderBy property by entering one or more field names, the records are sorted in ascending order. Similarly, Visual Basic sorts these fields in ascending order by default.

If you want to sort records in descending order, type DESC at the end of the string expression. For example, to sort customer records in descending order by contact name, set the OrderBy property to "ContactName DESC".

You can set the OrderBy property by using the object's property sheet, a macro, or Visual Basic.

Remarks

For reports, the OrderByOn property must be set to Yes to apply the sort order specified by the object's OrderBy property. For forms, select the field by which you want to sort the records and either click the appropriate Sort button on the toolbar, or point to Sort on the Records menu and click the appropriate command on the submenu. You can also set the OrderByOn property for either forms or reports by using Visual Basic.

Setting the OrderBy property for an open report will run the report's Close and Open event procedures.

Note   When a new object is created, it inherits the RecordSource, Filter, OrderBy, and OrderByOn properties of the table or query it was created from. For forms and reports, inherited filters aren't automatically applied when an object is opened.