Sorting and Formatting Information Displayed in NIM

Sorting

Columns can be sorted by clicking on one of the arrows that are above each column heading. Clicking on the arrow on the left sorts the column in ascending (alphabetical down the column, values increase down the column) order. Clicking on the right arrow sorts the column in descending (values decrease down the column) order.

The first column you click on is the primary sort. The next is the second sort criterion, etc. Note that the use of these arrows might override a search order you selected in the query frame. (The sort orders specified for entities that are subtotaled are respected and cannot be changed by the use of sort arrows in the output display; rather the sort orders you specify with the arrows are applied within the "subtotal groups".)

You can not "deselect" a sort: if you want to change the primary, secondary, etc. sort criteria you must submit a new query.

Format Options

By default output is displayed in an HTML table. Internet Explorer users can cut and paste directly from the HTML table output into other applications, such as Excel.

Two other options are available if you wish to "cut and paste" output into a file.

1. You can get plain text output by clicking on the Plain text link.
2. The Pipe-separated link produces output in which the columns are separated by a "pipe" ("|") character. Netscape users should be able to simply copy the contents and paste them into a spreadsheet program such as Excel, and then run something like "Text to Columns" (from Excel's Data Menu) specifying | as the delimiter character. With Excel 2000 you may have to highlight a single column to get this to work, but all columns will still be converted! As noted above, Internet Explorer users can simply cut and paste from the HTML tabular output.

Example Display

This output appears in the Result Frame.

The following list is first sorted in ascending order on the PI column and then sorted in descending order by the Alloc column.