I've personally scrambled a monstrous Excel spreadsheet that very way on a day I was tired, rushed and frustrated. However, I never do anything to any data, except on a working copy of it, saved specifically to mess around with. The original data is saved, in fact, in a read-only state, to prevent me from screwing it up. I didn't even notice that I had screwed up until later, when I was comparing rows for another reason.

I've had others scramble my spreadsheets that way, too, destroying the integrity of data I had put into spreadsheet form. Once, the scrambled table ended up being published in a major national magazine, when someone at the magazine sorted a column that way. It was a definite SNAFU situation. Fortunately, I still had the original file, so I could demonstrate that it wasn't my fault. Lots of egg on lots of faces that caused.

In the middle of a political campaign in a strategically critical primary, the simplest answer involves sabotage, not random failure.

This is a presidential election with a tremendous amount at stake, and knowing presidential history and dirty tricks throughout that history it's more likely that some nefarious actions were taken to leverage advantage towards one candidate over another

The paucity of voting machines in Maricopa was probably done intentionally by the GOP in AZ, to disadvantage all democrats in the general -- or even other races in general in the primary. It had a side effect in the presidential primary.

Or, some zealous partisan has succeeded in hacking into registrations.

I don't jump to conclusions about any one individual. But obviously there was systematic suppression in AZ, and it probably impacted the race a great deal. No surprise. The lengths that people go to get their type of candidate into power are huge.

It's amazing how going through 1500 rows of a spreadsheet -- one by one -- solidifies the learning experience.

Always work on a working copy. Never work on the original file. Always maintain multiple read-only backups of the original file. It's a lesson that everyone should learn, but it gets forgotten every day, causing enormous problems.

In addition to that, Excel tracks the last 100 actions. Any one or all of them can be undone. The only time that list is emptied is when the file is closed, not when it's merely saved.

The problem is that a mis-sorted column often goes unnoticed by anyone until it's too late to fix. A working copy is the only safe way to mess around with big spreadsheets of data. Then, it's fairly easy to check some records at random to make sure no misaligned columns have occurred.

Personally, I've always thought that Excel's dialog box warning is unclear. In fact, I think sorting a column without selecting the entire dataset should be almost impossible in Excel. It's one of the most commonly made errors by inexperienced workers.

My way around sorting a column by itself though is to simply select a cell within the column rather than the entire column. Excel makes the assumption you're sorting the entire table and there isn't even a dialog box displayed.

Another issue occurs when you have a blank column in excel. Excel sees the data on each side of the column as unrelated and only sorts half. I usually use a astrik in that blank column just so excel sees all the data as related.

than an Excel spreadsheet. The registration databases in question utilize are SQL relational databases, not flat files. What you describe in terms of sorting an Excel worksheet cannot happen to a relational database.

of how data can be scrambled unintentionally.

No one does reporting through SQL Services. Well, almost no one.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]“If you're not committed to anything, you're just taking up space.”
Gregory Peck, Mirage (1965)[/center][/font][hr]

spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are a red herring.