Hello All, I have a list of authors in a folder in My Docs that are listed in alphabetical order but by First name not surname. Is it possible to rearrange the list in surname order?? I've tried everything I can think of including the suggestion of retyping the list. It is 2500 names long. Any help would be very welcome please.

A "list" of authors? How is the list comprised? In a Word document? A bunch of .txt files? A list of names in a single .txt file?

My first thought is to pull this into a spreadsheet with first and last names in separate columns that you can then sort on. But we need to know what to pull in and from what type of file or files.

All the files are mobi types for my Kindle.

Okay, I think I understand. So for example, your "list" may look like this:

Andy Warhol.mobi
Anne Frank.mobi
C.S. Lewis.mobi
Edgar Allan Poe.mobi
Stephen King.mobi
William Shakespeare.mobi

and you want it to look like:

Anne Frank.mobi
Stephen King.mobi
C.S. Lewis.mobi
Edgar Allan Poe.mobi
William Shakespeare.mobi
Andy Warhol.mobi

If that is the case, then you cannot do this. The file system - the protocols used to store files on hard drives and keep track of their locations and associated file names sees "Anne Frank" as a single string of characters - including the space. Not as two words separated by a space. So it will be sorted by the first character in the string.

That's why even lists like this look the way they do.

If you wanted them resorted, you would need to change the format to, "Last, First.mobi"

The two lists you did look identical to me! I really want them like this:
Frank, Anne
Wharlol, Andy
Jones, John
Grisham, John etc...... But I can understand what you are saying about lists. I was hoping a piece of software would just transpose the christian name and the surname. If that isn't possible I will have to live with the lists the way they are. Thank you for trying.

The two lists you did look identical to me!

Huh? Look again. The first is sorted by the first name and the second by the last.

What you are really trying to do (computer wise) is not sort by last name, but to rename each file name. And that pretty much is going require renaming each, one at a time. Some very creative batch code writers could do it by searching for the space character then swapping the characters before the space with those after the space, while leaving the extension (.mobi) where it is. But problems would occur every time there was more than one space, such as with Edgar Allan Poe. Instead of Poe, Edgar Allan it might end up as Allan, Poe Edgar - or it might crash the batch process.

So yeah, sorry. This is something you are going to have to live with I am afraid. Or, you can take the time, a lot of time, to manually do it one file name at a time.

I suspected as much, Digerati, but I'm always ready to be surprised and astounded but just not this time. Hey Ho, Thank you very much for the time spent trying. I have to live with worse than lists the wrong way round so I'll just suck it up. Thanks again Stron.

No problem. And thanks for the thanks!

Just for the heck of it I searched Google for file renaming programs and got quite a few hits. Several sound like they may do what you want.

I've never tried any of them so if you do i would strongly urge you to make a backup of the files before you start messing with them.