Tom is creating a website about the history of his local football club. Among the famous wins and memorable goals that will appear there, he is compiling an A-Z of every player to have pulled on the shirt. There are hundreds of players on this list and he hopes that eventually he will write a brief biography of each one. The site would be set up so that when a user sought information about a specific player, they would simply click on the required letter of the alphabet to bring up every player whose surname starts with that letter and choose the one they seek from the list. Tom has entrusted his brother to type out a complete list of players for him.

Eventually Tom receives an email from his brother with a Word document attachment containing the names of each player Tom is initially pleased with this, but on opening the attachment, he is disheartened to see that his brother has typed out the list alphabetically, but he has ordered them by first name. This means that the first entry on the website list, Ken Abbott, is filed down among the K entries in the Word document, and the second entry, Billy Abell, comes under B. It is a mess that will take a long time to sort out.

Fortunately, Tom is a resourceful type who is fairly adept in the use of Microsoft Word, and he works out a way to sort the list alphabetically by surname. You might like to type out a short list of random names, surname last, and follow these instructions to see how it works.

The first thing to do is to make sure that only one player's name occupies each line of the document. Select the entire list and click on the Table tab and then select the Sort option to open up the Sort Text dialog box. Click the Options button to open the Sort Options dialog box and click on the Other radio button. Delete whatever is in the box and replace it with a single press of the space bar. This tells Word that you want to use the space between the first and last names to divide the fields. Click OK to close the Sort Options dialog box.

Back in the Sort Text dialog box, click on the arrow to open the Sort By drop-down list and select Word 2. Obviously, this instructs Word to sort the list by the second word, and it demonstrates why there should only be one name per line for this to work. Click OK and your list of names will be reordered alphabetically, according to surname.

It should be noted that this will only work with names that are only two words long. Any players' names with more than two words, such as Shaun Wright Phillips, should be separated with hyphens, not spaces (Shaun Wright-Phillips). Any similar problems, perhaps where there are two forenames, must be dealt with in a similar fashion, by using a non- breaking space, such as a hyphen or underscore.

Microsoft Word has the capability to deal with many word-processing problems, including some rather surprising solutions as in the example above. A training course on the use of this powerful application will demonstrate that there is a lot more to Word than mere word-processing.