Submitted by WayneK on 2018/06/09 12:36
I'd appreciate input on how others handle sorting book titles. 
 
Option #1: Enter full book titles.
 
Pros: simple and obvious
 
Cons:
a) many books clumped together at "The" and "A" (not necessarily a problem but see "b")
b) when I manually scan for a book title, I find myself looking for the first major word in the title, not "the" or "a"
c) some books end up in weird places (eg books that begin with "...")
 
Option #2: Skip initial "the", "a" etc
 
Pros: fixes cons of option #1
Cons: creates book titles that are technically incomplete and incorrect (I've thought about adding the initial word at the end but this is clumsy)
 
Option #3: Allow sorting that ignores a defined list of initial words
 
Pros: all the advantages and none of the disadvantages of #1 and #2.  I don't believe InfoQube can do this.  If not, I'd like to suggest it as a future feature.  I can't remember where I saw it but I have seen lists sorted this way online.  There may well be other circumstances where having this feature would be useful.
 
Wayne
9.108b

Comments

I had a similar problem some years ago with Album titles for a music database.
 
I solved it by including another field which I called 'Sort' which was usually the title of the album but without the 'The' or the 'A' or the '...' or whatever.
 
Then I sorted on the 'Sort' field.
 
 

You could create a text field and populate it using a simple equation triggered by a form of a field value.
 
Pierre_Admin
IQ Designer
 

Thanks for the suggestions.  I'll probably go with a sort field.
 
 
Wayne