ศาลาชุมนุม

[Expat]

I'm compiling my Thai-English vocab notes in MS Excel (English menus etc).
When I've finished, if not before, I'd like to sort them in Thai dictionary order.
The regular A->Z Excel sort sorts by initial character, which may be an orthographically-initial vowel.
Does anyone know of a way of sorting, in Excel, alphabetically by initial Thai consonant?

Thanks in advance

[David and Bui]

You may have seen this already: download.microsoft.com/download/7/2/5/725c8d01-ad67.../tha-tha-styleguide.pdf

Within this document, the Microsoft sort order is discussed on page 15.

[David and Bui]

I just tried to sort Thai words in Excel also. Doesn't come out right. I do have Thai as one of the proofing languages and as an editing language in Office. So, when you find out how to do it, please let us know.

Thanks.
_______________________________

Interesting! I just copied and pasted a test deck into Word. Word appeared to make a Table. I sorted the words in this table, and the result was the correct sort order. Now, how to figure out the difference between Word and Excel functionality?

[Expat]

Many thanks, David.

I haven't come across it before.
The hyper-link was disabled and the mid section of the link was truncated.
I went to Office downloads on Microsoft.com, searched for the pdf file (the tail end of the link), found the file and downloaded it.

Oops! just seen your follow-up post.

[Expat]

Hi David

You may have hit on the solution.

Cut & Paste from Excel into Word, as a table, sort it then cut & paste it back in Excel (or use import a tab-delimited data file).
Any subsequent additions can be inserted manually until it's more appropriate to repeat the exercise.
The result is what matters most. The hassle of cut & paste etc is less of a problem.

It's the tab-delimited data aspect that Word uses to generate the table correctly.

Many thanks

PS "I do have Thai as one of the proofing languages and as an editing language in Office."
Just re-checked -although I've got Thai as an editing/viewing language, I don't have the dictionary for proofing.

[David and Bui]

Why not build the database in Access?

[Expat]

I haven't used Access for 20 years or more, having, at one stage, done Access/dBase programming.
Would Access correctly sort it as per the Thai dictionary?
I appear to have Access 2007 installed, but no Thai dictionary.
I also have the free Open Office, which is basically compatible with MS Office.

[Expat]

I've updated Open Office and it comes with a whole load of available add-on dictionary language packs, including a Thai one, although the Thai one hasn't been updated recently and is totally useless!

The good news is that I did a sort and it appears to have worked, sorting by initial consonant, with orthographically-initial vowels being sorted in order following the sort of their corresponding initial consonant.

[Expat]

Unfortunately, Open Office, although it allows saves in various Excel formats, it doesn't support Excel 2007.

I saved it in an available Excel 5(?) format but, when I tried to load it into Excel 2007, none of the Thai characters were recognised and were all replaced by strings of "???"s. So, if I use O-O for the sort, it looks like I'm locked out of subsequently uploading it into Excel.