Is there a global sort change option

Hello everyone. On the edit your book page, there is a gray sort box to the right of the book title. Mine always had a default of 5 and I never used it, so I left it. Now I am trying to sort a collection very specifically and I found that by changing the sort number to 'start' that it sorts correctly.

I have several thousand books in my library. Is there a way to globally change ALL of the books (already entered) to sort by start instead of the 5th place value? Or do I have to do it for each single volume?

Thank you. I cannot find any help topics on this, ;-(.

>1 GraceBibleAZ: It shouldn't be 5 everywhere, it should automatically detect articles and disregard them, so 5 should be for titles starting with 'the', 3 for those starting with 'a', 0 when sorting by the first letter.

>1 GraceBibleAZ: Hello everyone. On the edit your book page, there is a gray sort box to the right of the book title. Mine always had a default of 5

That box tells the system where the true name of the book begins. For example, the most recent book I added is The Text Of The Canterbury Tales, Volume V. This name starts with "The," but you probably don't want to sort it by "The," you want to sort it based on "Text of the Canterbury Tales...."

The box says, "Sort starting with the fifth character."

By contrast, if you look at William II : Rufus, the red king, the box is empty, because you want to sort that book by "William."

If you look at A Short History of New Zealand, the box is set to a value of 3, because you want to sort by "Short History of...." Not by "A."

That box tells the sorting algorithm where the sortable name starts. It's very useful!

The reason you've seen so many books that have the value set to 5 is because so many books have names starting with "The." Unless you want to sort based on all the "The's" in your library, you don't want to change it. :-)

I hope that helps.

Thanks for the help guys - I understand that the sorting starts at that position to avoid articles (the, etc.) in the title.

My situation is that I do want LT to sort by the first letter in a particular collection and it is defaulting to a value of 5, so the books are not sorting properly. When I change the sort to 'start' it works fine. Is there is a way to tell it to sort by the first (starting) letter, without having to change it for every single book.

Thanks.

>4 GraceBibleAZ: For titles that start with 'the' it will automatically change to 5. AFAIK, there's no way to default it to 0 always. You can add 'sort character' to one of your catalogue views and edit directly then.

>Awwwwww. OK. Thanks for trying to help me. My books don't have 'the' or any articles, but they do each have a special, 3 letter selector in front of the title. Onward and upward, ;-)

Thank you very much!

Did they have The at the beginning of the title when they were added and the titles were changed later?