About This Tool
Organizing lists manually is time-consuming and error-prone. When you have dozens or hundreds of items to alphabetize, clicking and dragging in a spreadsheet gets tedious fast. One misplaced entry ruins the whole sequence, forcing you to start over. This List Sorter (Alphabetizer) handles the work instantly. Paste your unsorted list, choose your sorting method, and get perfectly organized results in seconds. Whether you are sorting names for a directory, organizing product categories, or alphabetizing bibliography entries, this tool does it all with options to remove duplicates, ignore common articles, sort by surname, and add automatic numbering in multiple formats.
How to Alphabetize a List
Alphabetizing a list with this tool takes three simple steps:
- Paste your list: Copy your unsorted items from any source (Excel, Word, plain text file, email) and paste into the "Before" input box. Each item should be on a new line by default, but you can change the separator to comma, space, or custom character.
- Choose options: Select A-Z (ascending) or Z-A (descending) sort. Enable "Remove duplicates" if your list has repeated items. Turn on "Case-insensitive" to treat "Apple" and "apple" as the same. For name lists, use "Sort by Last Word" to alphabetize by surname.
- Sort and export: Click "Sort List" to see results instantly in the "After" box. Copy to clipboard or download as a .txt file. The statistics box shows how many items were processed and how many duplicates were removed.
The side-by-side layout lets you compare before and after, making it easy to verify the sort worked correctly.
Sorting Options Explained
Sort Modes:
- A-Z (Ascending): Standard alphabetical order from A to Z. Numbers come before letters, with natural sorting so "item2" comes before "item10".
- Z-A (Descending): Reverse alphabetical order from Z to A.
- Reverse Order: Flips the current order of your list without alphabetizing. First item becomes last, last becomes first.
- Random Shuffle: Randomizes the order of items. Useful for creating random draw lists or mixing up ordered data.
- Sort by Last Word: Alphabetizes based on the last word in each line. Perfect for sorting names by surname when formatted as "First Last".
- Keep Original: Applies other options (remove duplicates, numbering, trimming) without changing the order.
Numbering Formats:
- 1, 2, 3: Standard Arabic numerals (1. item, 2. item, 3. item)
- a, b, c: Lowercase letters (a. item, b. item, c. item)
- i, ii, iii: Lowercase Roman numerals (i. item, ii. item, iii. item)
- I, II, III: Uppercase Roman numerals (I. item, II. item, III. item)
All numbering formats automatically adjust based on list length. The 100th item in lowercase letters becomes "cv." in the correct alphabetical sequence.
Advanced Features
Remove Duplicates: When enabled, only the first occurrence of each item is kept. Works with case-insensitive option to catch duplicates that differ only in capitalization.
Case-Insensitive Sorting: Treats uppercase and lowercase letters the same when sorting and detecting duplicates. "Apple" and "apple" are considered identical.
Ignore Articles: Removes leading "the", "a", and "an" when sorting. "The Beatles" sorts under "B" instead of "T". The articles remain in the output, only the sorting comparison ignores them.
Strip HTML Tags: Removes HTML markup from items before sorting. Useful when sorting content copied from websites that includes formatting tags.
Trim Whitespace: Removes leading and trailing spaces from each item. Prevents items with extra spaces from being treated as different entries.
Custom Separators: Beyond the standard newline, comma, and space separators, you can define custom separators like semicolons, pipes, or tabs to match your data format.
Common Use Cases
Education:
- Alphabetize student roster lists for attendance
- Organize bibliography entries for papers and theses
- Sort vocabulary words for study materials
- Create alphabetical seating charts
Business & Office:
- Sort employee directories by last name
- Organize product catalogs and inventory lists
- Alphabetize contact lists for easy lookup
- Create indexed reference materials
Personal Organization:
- Sort grocery lists by aisle or category
- Alphabetize music playlists and book collections
- Organize bookmark folders
- Create sorted address lists for holiday cards
Data Management:
- Clean and deduplicate data exports from databases
- Prepare lists for import into other systems
- Organize tag lists and category hierarchies
- Sort API response data for analysis
Tips for Best Results
Choose the Right Separator: If your items contain commas (like addresses), use newline separator. For simple word lists, space or comma works fine. The custom separator option handles unusual formats like pipe-delimited database exports.
Sort Names Correctly: For lists formatted as "First Last", use "Sort by Last Word" to alphabetize by surname. For "Last, First" format, standard A-Z sort works perfectly since the surname already comes first.
Clean Data First: Enable "Trim Whitespace" to catch items that look identical but have different spacing. Use "Strip HTML Tags" when sorting content copied from web pages.
Verify Duplicates: After sorting with "Remove duplicates" enabled, check the statistics to see how many duplicates were found. A high duplicate count might indicate data quality issues in the source.
Numbering After Sorting: Apply numbering after your list is sorted and deduplicated. This ensures the numbers reflect the final order and count.
Use Side-by-Side Comparison: The Before/After layout makes it easy to spot any items that did not sort as expected, especially when dealing with special characters or numbers mixed with text.