Forum Discussion
Date-time ties not sorting correctly
I have some data that represents an occurence of one object changing between 'stages', and the time that each change occured. The data appears in reverse-chronological order:
| Timestamp | OldStage | NewStage | Order |
| 2020-03-03T20:12:37 | Stage 4 | Stage 5 | 5 |
| 2020-02-29T12:22:56 | Stage 2 | Stage 4 | 4 |
| 2020-02-13T09:39:10 | Stage 1 | Stage 2 | 3 |
| 2020-02-13T09:39:10 | Stage 2 | Stage 1 | 2 |
| 2020-02-11T17:18:25 | Stage 1 | Stage 2 | 1 |
The data shows a single journey from Stage 1 to 5 at every step - Starting at 1, moving to 2, then back to 1 and so on. I have a record of when these changes occured in the form of a date-time timestamp. Unfortunately, on occasion there are duplicate timestamps, when it appears the object moves forwards then quickly backwards again (or vice versa). Thankfully I know for a fact the order that the data appears is the order that it occured, so am able to add an 'order' column to sort by.
What I would like to do is to plot the data almost as-is in a table, but without the order column. When I try to do this, and sort by the timestamp column, often it will sort the ties in the wrong order (here the 2nd and 3rd rows should be reversed):
I have tried to sort the Timestamp column by the Order column I created, but this is not permitted:
I guess my question is: Is there a way that I can order the timestamp column in my table so that the ties are always ordered correctly, without having to include my order column and sort by that?
if you sort where there is a duplicate value you will not be able to sort, you will either need to clean up your data or provide a value to your COLUMN colum that has a one to one relationship with the column you want to sort.
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if you sort where there is a duplicate value you will not be able to sort, you will either need to clean up your data or provide a value to your COLUMN colum that has a one to one relationship with the column you want to sort.