 sorts sort criteria determine what order the records are retrieved from the database and displayed in generally all you need to do is pick a field and choose ascending 1 2 3 4 or descending 4 3 2 1 and it will be done if you have multiple sort criteria the second and later items only come into play if the first item is the same different data types sort just a little bit differently from others number fields number fields sort like you would expect 1 comes before 2 which comes before 10 which comes before 100 which comes before 200 etc text fields text fields always sort alphabetically even if the text contains numbers this can have some odd effects if you have numbers stored in text because the values 1 3 7 10 12 20 100 120 will sort like this 1 10 100 12 120 200 3 7 this is because these fields sort purely by characters and not numeric value ie comparing 200 and 3 the 2 comes before the 3 therefore 200 is smaller than 3 date fields date fields often can have a granularity which is a way of making similar dates actually be the same date take two dates that are close to each other  may 1 2007 530 am and may 1 2007 945am  without granularity the two dates are compared and the first date comes before the second date however if the granularity is set to day it only looks at the parts of the date up to the day  may 1 2007 and may 1 2007  at that point they are the same and the sort would move on to the next sort criterion  