National FIS Software : Competitors Sort
Overview
Clicking on Sort will give a list of possible sort options, often with sub-options for Ascending and Descending. The list will vary depending on the settings on the Header Tab.
Under most situations you won’t need to use the sort options. Whenever a report is generated it will sort the competitors into the correct order.
If the order it creates is not correct or you have a special situation that needs a particular order this can be achieved as follows:
- In the Edit|Options menu uncheck the ‘Automatically Sort when needed’ option. When this is unchecked it will give a prompt any time it would normally sort, giving you the option to accept the default sort or not.
- Using the sort options (with or without a block marked) and possibly the Move option get the competitors into the order needed.
- Print the report. When it prompts to ‘Sort ?’ answer ‘N’
- NOTE: In the event of more than one competitor having the same value for a sort option the original order is maintained. For example, if you sort by Time and then sort by Class you'll end up with the Competitors sorted by Time within Class. This can be very useful!
Random Sorting
Questions often come up about this.
Only Random Sort Once!
There is no such thing as more random. If you sort a number of competitors using the Random option and you don't like the resulting order, or if you see some strange coincidence (such as three competitors from the same team grouped together, that is still a legitimate result of random sorting. Always sort only once and accept the resulting order as random.
Is it truly Random?
Technically, no, it's pseudo-random. But, the argument can easily be made that for this application pseudo-random is random enough.
For those interested here's how Random Sorting is done by Split Second: